


Ingenious Gentlemen and the Persistence of Memory

by muldezgron



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Daedra (Elder Scrolls), Daedric Princes (Elder Scrolls), Denial, Elder Scrolls Lore, I Tried To Write Gen I Swear, I'm Bad At Tagging, Khunzar-rine, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reincarnation, Slow Burn, Soul Shriven Are Basically Daedra, yes you read that correctly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 61,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26565943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muldezgron/pseuds/muldezgron
Summary: In the year 2E 582, Molag Bal attempted to merge his plane of Oblivion with Nirn in an event known as the Planemeld, but was thwarted by a hero known as the Vestige and his companions, as guided by the Daedric Prince of Light, Meridia. Two eras later, in 4E 201, the Vestige is killed in his home, respawns in Coldharbour, and hatches a bizarre plan for vengeance on Molag Bal which is definitely not an ego-sparing cover for recovering his soul.This is not his story (probably). This is the Tale of the Gallant Knight of Coldharbour (maybe) who sets out to help his dear friend the Vestige on his Noble Quest (possibly) and is 100% Totally Fine No Problems Thanks For Asking.
Relationships: Cadwell & Meridia (Elder Scrolls), Cadwell/Male Vestige (Elder Scrolls), Khunzar-ri/Cadwell the Betrayer
Comments: 15
Kudos: 18





	1. All Shapes Derive from the Square

**Author's Note:**

> Archive Warnings are fairly solid now. The graphic violence is there from the get-go; the major character death is warned for in its specific chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has actually been done since July, but it's been languishing in Beta Reader Limbo. It was probably necessary, though. Thank you, North Bound, for making sure I didn't publish unreadable nonsense!

There are those who say Coldharbour is merely a ghost of the shape that Nirn would possess if Molag Bal ever succeeded in conquering it. These people have no imagination. To be fair, however, neither does Molag Bal.

Nirn has mountain ranges. Some, like the Throat of the World, are genuinely impressive, with summits high enough to see halfway across Tamriel through a clear sky. Nirn does not have towering spires of black granite, as sharp and unweathered as the fangs in the jaw of a massive beast. You cannot walk to the edge of Nirn, perch on a jagged outcropping, and stare into the black depths of the Void itself.

Honestly, it makes rubbish disposal so much more difficult.

Nirn and Coldharbour have many of the same herbs and flowers in common, and many of the same animals—slaughterfish and trodh in the rivers of plasm, scuttlers hiding in the brush, netches floating along with tentacles skimming the ground—but in Coldharbour you are significantly more likely to see a single bantam guar scurrying along the roads and byways, closely followed by an elderly soul-shriven wearing a leather pack on his back and a cast-iron pot on his head. The bantam guar is Honor. She has a knack for always knowing exactly where she needs to go, and has never been shy about it.

Following Honor did tend to require a bit more finesse than teleporting to a known destination. She was a fearless steed, with absolutely no concern for her own safety as she charged headlong through parties of banekin and wove between the legs of Spider Daedra. It kept him on his toes, still spry enough to circle around Dremora scouts undetected without falling behind, though inevitably Honor would rush in too close to a hungry clannfear or two and need imminent rescue. Possibly she was doing it on purpose; certainly she showed no sign of distress when he would need to smack one in the jaw with a heavy ladle until it dislocated and let her slip out. Honor would just squawk at him the rest of the fight, stubs flapping in irritation until the clannfear collapsed in a heap and they were on their way again. _That should have been over in one strike,_ she was saying, _you’re getting careless._

Here, however, was a small problem. A large small problem. The entrance to the cave was blocked by an ogrim, sitting on the ground with its legs splayed outward. It posed no obstacle whatsoever to Honor, who ran around it and into the opening faster than it could register movement. He, however, would not have the stealth advantages of a bantam guar: it would definitely notice him if he tried to sneak past it.

Honor scratched at the cave floor impatiently while he considered his options. He could teleport in and be done with it, the fastest option. He could also go around the long way, take a dip in the azure plasm, and swim in through the mouth of the grotto. Both options still left an ogrim waiting at the primary exit, an ambush for the vulnerable and unaware.

“I suppose it can’t be helped,” he said to himself as he slipped the ladle into his knapsack and drew his sword. “Let’s make it quick, then. _Tally-ho!_ ”

The shout, as intended, drew the ogrim’s attention, and it turned its upper body toward the sound with a roar. The roar immediately trailed off in confusion: there was nothing there.

That was all it had time to think before the sword had embedded itself into the back of its neck. A perfectly vertical drop, tip to hilt, one boot planted on the crossguard to add his full weight to the force of gravity. The ogrim slumped over, dispatched before his feet touched the ground. It never felt a thing.

Honor clucked with approval, then resumed scratching the ground. _That’s more like it! Now leg it, we haven't got all day._

“I won’t be long, don't worry,” he said, pulling his sword out of the corpse and giving it a few swings to shake the excess blood off. “Poor thing, though. At least he won’t have far to go this time around.”

There was a part of him that was tainting his sympathy with a hint of pride: _over four eras old and I’ve still got it,_ or thereabouts. He ignored it.

It was a fairly short trip down the tunnel—a meandering fissure, really, worn smooth by thousands of years of foot travel—before arriving in the main cavern of the grotto. It was one of the larger ones, with a mighty dome of stalactites dripping into a shallow pool of azure plasm slowly oozing in from outside. Half-formed, writhing figures dotted the landscape: Dremora torsos with nubs for limbs, full-sized yet embryonic clannfear without bony frills, even one instance of the deflated mess of skin and limbs that makes up a watcher before its eyes have grown back.

He had just begun to scan the area when Honor let out a eureka of a shriek and began paddling through six inches of plasm toward their charge: a black shorthair Cathay Khajiit laying face down at the edge of the pool.

He lowered himself down, squatting on his haunches as he grasped the Khajiit by the shoulder and carefully, gently rolled him over onto his back. The Khajiit did not move: he laid as still as a corpse, and the soul shriven stayed beside him, perched like a bird on a shop sign.

It was a bit of a wait, a good several minutes, before the Khajiit’s chest began to rise and fall on its own. He smiled and tickled a fingertip along the edge of an ear.

The Khajiit flicked his ears in annoyance at the touch, grumbling but with eyes still shut.

“Terribly sorry, Cat,” he said, gently, "But you need to wake up.” He continued to bother the Khajiit's ears and boop his nose until he let out a heavy yawn and his eyes started to open. Not very much, but still—open.

“Cadwell?” he said, blearily, squinting up at his face.

“ _Sir_ Cadwell,” he replied, cheerily, “I am a gallant knight, after all.”

He groaned and rubbed at his eyes. “Cadwell, it has been _two whole eras_ since Raksha last called you ‘sir,’ he is not about to pick it back up.”

“Splendid!” He patted Raksha's head fondly. “You're recorporalizing so well. You’ve already got a sense of temporality back.” The hand doing the patting lazily dodged an irritated swat of claws.

“Cadwell, stop it,” he whined, “What are you even doing?”

“Well,” said Cadwell, fishing through his knapsack, “I know you don't need help escaping as such these days, what with those clever tricks you picked up from the Physics—”

“— _Psijics_ ,” said Raksha.

“—but I did think,” he continued, “that it might be a good idea to put some clothes on first.”

Raksha's eyes flew open and he shot upright, a dawning horror on his face as he looked down and saw himself drenched in azure plasm, as naked as the day he was born.

A folded set of robes slowly gravitated into his peripheral vision, and continued on its journey until it parked in front of his nose, blocking most of the view.

He took the robes with the tiniest peep of a “thanks”.

“You’re welcome,” said Cadwell, resting his arms on his knees.

☙

One quick change and portal to the Hollow City restored most of Raksha's dignity. Most of it. The robes were enough to be decent, but not a permanent solution. He’d had to go through the merchant stalls in search of something that looked less like a burlap bag that had undergone multiple life-saving surgeries.

“Since when has Honor been a she?” asked Raksha, wriggling into a painfully plain pair of leather boots. Cadwell did not, as a rule, carry enough currency to properly outfit a self-styled archmage in the manner to which he was accustomed. It was something of a miracle that he carried any at all.

“Oh, about two hundred years,” said Cadwell, cheerfully retrieving his coin purse. “I never did ask her what she preferred, it turns out. Gave me a good talking-to about it after the Oblivion Crisis.”

“Is... that so,” he said, uneasily. His left ear tilted sideways in mild confusion.

Honor flapped her arms and screeched at Raksha, tilting her head back and forth to look at him with one eye, then the other.

“She hopes that’s not a tone of disapproval,” added Cadwell.

“Oh no, of course not,” said Raksha, his ears snapping upright. “Honor has this one’s full support, always.”

“Glad to hear it, old friend.” He looped his thumbs through the top of his belt, wading ankle-deep into the wet grass at the edge of the City's central pond. “Did you know, these tall ones that look like sausages on a stick—”

The topic whiplash almost physically threw him off balance. “The plants?” Raksha ventured.

“Yes, of course,” said Cadwell, continuing without missing a beat. “Anyway, they’re edible. Can even make decent flour from them, turns out. A bit unfortunate to have to pick them from a garden pond, of course. Shame they won’t grow in plasm.”

The Khajiit squinted at him in confusion. “Are you telling this one you've been... harvesting and eating the pond plants?”

“They’re not particularly compatible with your palate,” he replied. “Bit of an aftertaste. Wonderful in soups, though.”

Raksha sighed, rubbed his eyes, then looked at Cadwell with sudden, uncomfortable recognition. “Wait. In the common tongue, are these not the plants called... ‘cattails’?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Cadwell, innocently. “In Cyrodiil, they’re called typha.”

“Raksha should really not be surprised that you would eat such a thing,” he said, hands clasped and golden eyes briefly rolling upward in faux supplication. “He could smell from miles away what you consider to be a tasty snack.” A wry half-smile crossed his mouth, revealing part of a fang. “Do you remember the time this one made you eat bread and honey, Cadwell?”

“As if I could ever forget,” he replied, sourly. “I still can’t get the taste of bee spittle out of my mouth.”

“You were the one who accepted Khajiit’s challenge,” said Raksha, failing to restrain a snicker. “‘If we manage to stop the Planemeld and make it out intact—’”

“I’m glad you’ve managed to wring two eras of amusement out of it,” said Cadwell. “I don’t suppose I could persuade _you_ to try something a bit more reasonable.”

“Not even once,” he replied, crossing his arms. He looked out over the pond at the crumbling remains of an Ayleid statue. “This one could go for a drink, though.”

Cadwell’s milky, featureless eyes lit up with glee and he scrambled out of the muck. “Of course! What are you in the mood for, friend? Last I heard, the Everfull Flagon just received a new shipment of Banekin Rum—”

“Tea,” said Raksha, “with all the sugar this gods-forsaken land has to offer.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Cadwell said, kicking the water from his boots. “I still happen to have a box of your favorite back home, just in case you popped in for a visit.”

“Muthsera’s Remorse!” he exclaimed. “Sometimes you are a _saint_ , Cadwell. This one’s sources were all wiped out in the Red Year.” His tail swished with approval. “Should this one congratulate you on finally building the house?”

Cadwell stared at him blankly.

“The house,” Raksha repeated. “That you were going to build so you aren’t living in a hovel.”

“I built a table,” he said, brightly. “And some chairs.”

☙

Cadwell did, indeed, have a table and some chairs. He did not have a roof, walls, or any other kind of furniture aside from barrels, crates, and a single bedroll shoved under the laundry line in an open shed. On their arrival, they found the chairs knocked over on their sides, with long gashes on the legs matching the size of clannfear claws.

“Dark moons, Cadwell,” said Raksha, ears back and eyes narrowed. “Build the house already.”

“I’ve been getting around to it,” he insisted, scrambling to right his chairs. “These things take time, you know.”

“It’s been _nearly a thousand years_ ,” he groaned. “Raksha could understand having a preference if you were a nomad, but you’ve been squatting in _this one spot_ for as long as he has known you.”

“It has the best view,” replied Cadwell.

Raksha sighed and shook his head, but still found himself turning to look out over the chasm at the lights of the Hollow City in the distance. He might be a hopeless fool, but he was right about the view.

It was not, to be honest, all that different from the place where they first met. That had been in the Wailing Prison; Cadwell had developed a habit of sneaking in and setting up camp in the nooks and crannies of the courtyard surrounding the Towers of Eyes. No outstanding heroics, that time—a campfire, a lute, a song or two or twelve around the fire. Just something to help distract the soul shriven prisoners from their lives, if only for a moment.

The Khajiit had drawn near the fire mid-song, waiting for him to finish, and it had honestly been quite difficult to do so without fumbling and forgetting the chords. He was clearly, blatantly without a soul, but also distractingly alive in appearance even for a brand-new soul shriven, and the expression of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness on his face had an uncanny familiarity to it, though he could not place from where or when.

He had applauded politely at the end of the song—the only person to do so, in fact—and approached for conversation the way a lava flow approaches the tide. “You must be Cadwell,” he had said.

“Sir Cadwell, yes indeed,” he had replied. “What can I help you with?”

“The door to the Prophet’s cell is sealed,” he'd said, crossing his arms. “Lyris told Khajiit that if there was any other way in, you would know it.”

“Ah, Lyris,” he said, fondly. “Mad as Sheogorath's trousers. She’s right, of course, for what difference that makes. The Prophet’s cell, hm?” Cadwell hummed to himself a moment, tunelessly picking at the lute as he thought. “You could try the Undercroft. That’s always a fun little jaunt.”

He nodded. “And where would that be?”

“Follow the river,” said Cadwell with a nod to his right. “Door to the Undercroft’s at the very end. You can’t miss it. Even if you couldn’t see it, you’d smell it.”

“Wonderful,” the Khajiit grumbled, turning to leave. “Thank you for the directions, Sir Cadwell.”

“Hang on,” he said. His hand clapped over the strings to silence them. “Is that it? Don’t I get a name before you set off on your dashing, heroic rescue?”

“Raksha,” said the Khajiit. “Raksha Cord-Eater.” He didn’t turn back all the way, but he had stopped leaving, and that counted for something.

“Raksha, hm.” He let his strumming hand fall back down, hanging loosely by his knee. “Can’t quite place your accent, I’m afraid. Not Anequina... Pellitine?”

“Pellitine,” he said, nodding. “This one was born and raised in Senchal.” He turned ever-so-slightly back towards Cadwell as he spoke.

How did he know that? He wasn’t quite sure. It was like something was itching, scratching at the back of his eyes.

“Let me see if I can remember the tuning for something,” said Cadwell, tweaking his lute’s pegs and picking strings as he spoke. “Can’t promise I’ll remember the lyrics, sadly, I’m rubbish at them.”

Raksha’s ear twisted to the side, bemused and uncertain. He seemed about to speak when Cadwell was finally satisfied with his adjustments and launched into the instrumental accompaniment to a Khajiiti dancing song. His ears shot upright, eyes wide with surprise.

It was the kind of song that served as a defense of the fretless lute, because even with a non-standard tuning, it called for notes that most men and mer did not consider notes—third notes, fifth notes, “it just sounds like _this_ ” notes—and Cadwell was somehow managing it, callused fingers rapidly flying up and down the lute’s neck but always landing true.

“This one did not think it was possible to play this on a lute,” said Raksha in genuine wonderment. “He would have thought it wouldn't have enough strings.”

“Oh, it’s possible,” said Cadwell, “though it loses something in translation. The notes live shorter lives, it’s not quite as clean, but you make do with what you have, eh? And here’s the part where I ruin everything, apologies in advance—”

He started singing and made it halfway through the first verse before Raksha burst out laughing.

“Butchered it that badly?” Cadwell asked, grinning ear to ear, his lute-playing continuing unabated.

“Your pronunciation is _awful_ ,” replied Raksha, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. “You sound like you have marbles in your mouth.”

“That sounds about right,” he said with a laugh. “Well, it’s not too late to salvage this! Do you know how it goes? I can guarantee you’ll sound significantly less marbles.”

It turned out he did, so Raksha sang while Cadwell played, and they went on like that for some time, long past the natural ending of the song. Poor Lyris Titanborn literally had to come over and tell them to stop faffing around. The world needed saving, after all.

The world always needed saving, until suddenly it didn’t.

“I have to admit,” Cadwell said, pouring out tea, “I haven't seen you this upset since the Warp in the West. I thought you had an arrangement going with the... Deal Masters?”

“Ideal Masters,” said Raksha, taking his cup with a sour expression. “And yes, this one has had a long-standing arrangement with them. Every time he is dealt fatal damage, a captured soul is sent to the Soul Cairn, and in trade for it, their power restores him on the spot, removing the need for a long reformation in Oblivion.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “So what happened?”

His ears flicked around, as if shooing away invisible flies. "Raksha was killed enough times to run out of soul gems.”

“That’s… quite a few deaths,” said Cadwell, eyebrows raised. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“This one is _fine_ ,” growled Raksha. “The problem is the looting of his _corpse_ and his _home_ by a thief and a scoundrel.”

He knew better than to point out that the Khajiit did not sound even remotely “fine”.

“The fool has no idea what he has made off with,” Raksha continued. “That helmet was enchanted by Sun-in-Shadow. Those robes were a gift from _Sotha Sil himself_ —”

“I see,” said Cadwell, taking a long sip of tea. “And the chestplate from Bazrag gro-Fharun?”

“Yes!” he hissed, hands slamming down on the table. “Rings from Ayrenn Aldmeri! Staves from Abnur Tharn!” His claws dug into the wood. “There is no merchant alive in Skyrim with the gold to afford even one.”

Cadwell hummed into his tea cup, but said nothing. They both knew this had nothing to do with money, but only one of them would ever admit it, and it was not the one whose tail was currently fluffed up to three times its normal size.

“Tch.” Raksha released his claws from the table, tiny ribbons of wood trailing in their wake. “So much effort, and in an instant, this one finds himself with nothing.”

“Oh, bosh," said Cadwell. “It’s a terrible loss, certainly, very fair to be upset about, but you aren’t left with _nothing_.”

“It’s been too long,” he replied with a sigh, picking up his own cup of tea. “Raksha knows the life of an adventurer well enough. Even the ash in the urns will be long gone by now.”

“But that isn’t everything,” Cadwell insisted. “You still have your life, your freedom, your particular set of skills, your…” He trailed off as he realized Raksha's heavy-lidded gaze had meandered to the side and started to glaze over.

Several seconds of silence passed, punctuated only by the sound of Honor utterly demolishing a comberry scone.

“So this… Dragonborn chap,” said Cadwell, uneasily, mainly to break the silence. “He just arrived at your place, then? Any idea how he found out where it was?”

The Khajiit grumbled under his breath.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“He knew where it was,” said Raksha, “because this one sent him an invitation.”

Cadwell blinked in confusion. “You sent him an invitation to siege your castle?”

“ _Khenarthi’s winds_ , Cadwell,” he sighed, impatiently. “Khajiit sent him an invitation _to trade_.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding, “That makes much more sense. So you issued him a normal, civilized invitation, and he arrived and started smashing around like a stone atronach in a ceramic shop, right?”

Raksha said nothing, eyes narrowed and claws tapping rhythmically against the side of his cup. He did not make eye contact.

“Cat,” said Cadwell, more sharply than he meant to, lowering his tea cup to the table. “I can tell when you’re leaving something important out.”

“He arrived,” the Khajiit said, in a low voice, “wielding the Mace of Molag Bal.”

The older soul shriven attempted, and failed, to hold back a burst of laughter.

“It's not funny,” Raksha mumbled, sourly.

“It’s not,” said Cadwell, crow's-feet wrinkling with lingering mirth. “You just had me so _worried_ , old friend. And then it turns out it’s just old Molag Bal again.”

“‘Just old Molag Bal again’,” he repeated, whiskers twitching back in a sneer. “He’s the Lord of Schemes, not the Daedric Prince of Dithering Grandfathers.”

“Well, he _could_ have been a dithering grandfather,” replied Cadwell, sipping his tea, “if he hadn’t been so insistent about poor Grunda and that frost atronach fellow she liked.”

“You never did explain to this one what your history with Molag Grunda is,” said Raksha, sourly. “Other than that you know a great deal about the mechanisms of the gatehouse, her flavor of hospitality, and who she’s taken as a lover at any given moment.” He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “This one has a hard enough time accepting Bal has children _at all_. If everything with Vivec wasn’t a puzzle inside of a riddle—”

“Ah, _Vivec_ ,” said Cadwell, brightly. “I think I might have heard about that.”

A wry smirk drew across the Khajiit’s face. “It is something, isn’t it? Even after meeting Vivec face-to-face, this one is no closer to understanding the 36 Lessons than a mere ja’khajiit. But if nothing else, Vivec has used the power of words alone to curse this one and countless others with the mental image of Vivec biting words into Molag Bal’s spear, and that is surely a triumph greater than that of any army.”

“Molag Bal’s spear?” Cadwell blinked in confusion. “I thought he preferred maces.”

“He does,” said Raksha, his smile fading. “But the spear is not—”

“Or axes,” he continued, “There’s a rumour the kyn have that he does enjoy a good axe, but none of them have the jellypots to ask him—”

“No, listen, it—”

“—not that I can blame them, honestly, he doesn’t seem like a good conversationalist. I mean, the Dremora aren't that particularly skilled at it themselves, but having to put up with—”

“ _It is not a literal spear_ ,” Raksha spat out, exasperated. “Vivec is a _poet_ , he speaks in _metaphor_ , it refers to his—” He stopped, blinked, and looked at Cadwell.

“Hm?” Cadwell hummed curiously, teacup perched in both hands in front of his face.

“You are not talking about Vivec’s version of the story,” Raksha said, slowly. “You have heard a different version.”

“The version I’ve heard certainly doesn't have any spears in it,” he replied, cheerfully.

The Khajiit mulled over this for a moment, hand resting at his chin in thought.

“All right,” he said. "What _is_ the story told in Coldharbour?”

“Well!” said Cadwell, excitedly, setting his tea down to free up his hands. “They say it was a long time ago in Vvardenfell, in Bal— Baller? No, that’s not right—”

“Bal Ur?”

“Yes! Bal Ur, that’s the place,” he said. “In that time there was nothing there yet, and Vivec had chosen it as a site for testing the limits of his power as a god.”

“And Molag Bal looked upon Vivec in the place of his birth,” said Raksha, nodding and waving for Cadwell to continue. “And saw that he was…”

“A challenging fight,” said Cadwell.

“A challenging fight,” repeated Raksha, slowly.

Cadwell shrugged. “What can I say? He just saw Vivec practicing some divine intromission and immediately wanted to give him a damned good thrashing.”

“To be fair,” said Raksha, "this one should have known the Daedric version would sound like this.”

“Specifically Xivilai,” said Cadwell. “They do love a good tale of—oh, but I shouldn't spoil it!” He clapped his hands and cleared his throat. “Anyway! They say Molag Bal and Vivec fought each other through three cycles of the moons, neither one managing any advantage over the other, until Vivec tricked Molag Bal and stole a powerful secret from him.”

“The word of royalty,” Raksha said, nodding.

“The hm?” Cadwell blinked at him.

“Never mind.” He waved dismissively. “This one was just thinking out loud. Go on.”

“In any case, Vivec didn't just steal a secret,” said Cadwell. “He _stole_ a secret.”

Raksha frowned at him, puzzled.

“Left a big hole behind where it used to be,” he clarified.

His puzzlement turned incredulous. “The secret was _physically part of him?_ ”

“Daedra are made of strange stuff,” said Cadwell, matter-of-factly. “And Daedric Princes even more so. Why not secrets?”

“Fair enough,” said Raksha, planting his elbows on the table and resting his chin in one hand. “What happened then?”

“They say,” he said, “that when Vivec stole the secret, he gifted Molag Bal with an equal weakness in the space left behind. And they say that the weakness was so great that Molag Bal had no choice but to throw himself into the Void to rid himself of it.”

Raksha frowned. “Did that work?”

“According to the Xivilai,” said Cadwell, “no. They say he still has it, just covers it up and acts like it isn't there. Like putting the lid on the pot and pretending supper isn't burnt.”

Raksha's gaze moved from Cadwell to a vague, unfocused distance as he wove his fingers together in front of his face.

“Fascinating little story, isn't it?”

“All stories are fascinating,” he replied. “What Raksha finds most fascinating is when there is one story with several versions. Often more truth can be learned from the comparison of stories than from one version alone.”

Cadwell shook his empty teacup and reached for the teapot. “Such as Molag Bal being into spears?”

“Such as that, yes,” said Raksha with a patient sigh. “But more than that, also. The differences are often the same events focused through the lens of culture. As this one said before, it comes as no surprise that the Xivilai tell a tale of a great battle while Vivec’s version is very… Vivec.” His brows furrowed in thought. “But there is also this detail, this ‘gift’ of weakness, that is not present in any form in Vivec’s telling, and it is curious that such a specific detail would appear in one version but not the other.”

Cadwell hummed contentedly as he poured himself another cup of tea.

“In many cases,” the Khajiit continued, “changing the perspective of the story changes the story completely, because no one person sees the same event in exactly the same way as any other. Some details will be important to one and invisible to another. So if that is the case here, then that would mean there is something that the Daedra of Coldharbour would know that—”

Raksha stopped. His ears perked upright; his eyes grew wide and shining; his tail thumped loudly against the leg of his chair.

“—that _Vivec would never notice_ ,” he said, almost awe-struck. His pupils had grown large and round, like he had just spied the most delicious sweetroll.

“Oh no,” said Cadwell. “I know that look. That’s your ‘I just had a Clever Idea’ look, and the answer is _no_ , absolutely not—”

“But it’s _brilliant,_ ” said Raksha. “If you could convince Meridia to join—”

“No,” repeated Cadwell, firmly. “Her Brightness is not going to be a part of this. She’s had a bad enough Fourth Era as it is.”

Raksha simply looked at him with flattened ears and round, pleading eyes.

“That’s not going to work, you cheeky sod,” he insisted, a warning in his voice. “You can’t just kitten-eye me into doing anything you want—”

☙

“Then your plan,” said Meridia, “is to make use of a Weakness whose existence you cannot even confirm.”

Cadwell cast a guilty glance toward Raksha.

“It is true that this one has not yet confirmed it,” the Khajiit said to the Prince, the lights of the Colored Rooms reflected in his eyes. “However, with your aid, Radiant One, it can be tested if you desire it, though testing will eliminate any future element of surprise. It gives Molag Bal forewarning and a chance to prepare, and Raksha feels strongly that the best course of action is to strike while he is still complacent.”

The Prince of Light tilted her head to one side. “It would also seem that your plan would call for Vivec’s participation in order to work,” she said.

“Not necessarily,” said Raksha. “The Weakness may be the result of Vivec’s actions, but it would seem that it continues to exist in his absence. Therefore, it needs only the Memory of His Presence, which this one can provide on his own.”

“And what do you think of this plan, Cadwell?” she asked, turning her attention towards him.

“Well,” said Cadwell. “I think it’s a good start, plenty of potential, perhaps it needs a little tweaking—”

The air shifted. The aurora in the distance had wandered from greens and blues to indigo, and the fog thickened and seemed almost golden, hovering closer to the base of the coral spires and floating stones. The watery ground had traded most of its luminance for a subtle sheen like the shell of a young egg.

Cadwell paused for a moment to take it in.

“You could have asked first,” he said.

“You refuse to speak truthfully in his presence,” replied Meridia. “I am left with no choice but to take the conversation to another room.”

He looked over at and through Raksha and Honor, both still to the point of neither breathing nor blinking, and sighed. “A room with its own time, I take it?”

“It is a reasonable concession,” she said, “to your clear desire to avoid conflict.”

“That's quite unnecessary,” he said. “I’m not avoiding conflict.”

“When I first invited you to become my champion,” said Meridia, “You were eager, for it fit well within the game you play to save yourself from despair.” The wind, such as it was, seemed to pick up behind her. “But once it became clear that I am not deceived—that I made my offer knowing you as you truly are—you ‘forgot’ about it. Repeatedly. Consistently.”

“Well, you can’t hold an old man accountable for that,” said Cadwell, uneasily. "My mind’s not what it used to be, after all.”

“You may lack conscious control of many things,” she said, “but this is not the result of age.”

“Look,” he said, “if this is about the Betrayer thing, the cat-folk and I have—”

“THAT IS WHO YOU **WERE** ,” she bellowed, the air itself ringing like a hammered gong. “THAT IS NOT WHO YOU **ARE** , FIRST OF THE SOUL SHRIVEN.”

Relief passed through his bones in tremors. This was the Meridia he knew—he had started to worry she was developing Azura’s subtlety, and the mere idea of _that_ was terrifying.

The ringing diminished and eventually cleared. “Tell me the truth,” said Meridia. “What do you think of Cord-Eater’s plan?”

“The plan is a bit daft,” he admitted. “He’s going to try it whether or not I’m there, though, so I might as well go along and try to stop it from going all pear-shaped.”

“And that is reason enough to assist him in seeking my aid?” She sounded offended. Justifiably so.

“If he doesn’t acquire your help, he’s probably going to go to Boethiah with it,” said Cadwell. “I don’t need to tell you how many ways that could go wrong.”

Meridia seemed to consider this.

“His Vestige is present,” she noted, “but his Soul is not.”

“I'd noticed that as well, yes,” replied Cadwell with a sigh. “He was recently killed by an adventurer wielding the Mace of Molag Bal, so Old Bal probably has it again.”

“I see,” she said. “He made no mention of this in his proposal.”

“He’s a bit of a strange egg,” he conceded. “I’m certain he knows his soul is gone, I’m certain he knows I know it’s gone, I’m fairly certain he even _knows_ that I know that he knows that I know. But he just won’t admit it out loud.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Meridia, grimly.

This was a nakedly intentional jab, and he ignored it. “It’s probably easier for him to propose an elaborate scheme—which would coincidentally give him the opportunity to retrieve his soul—than it is for him to ask for help getting it back. Too vulnerable, I suppose.”

“I see,” she said. “Your input has been most enlightening.”

The fog thinned and spread out along the ground, looking more like water again, and the lights in the sky warmed to a soft teal.

“It is an intriguing plan,” said Meridia, continuing as if nothing had happened, “if only because of how strongly it resembles a plan once carried out long ago, when the Mundus was still young.”

“Does it?” Raksha did his best to maintain an air of detached professional interest, but Cadwell could see the tip of his tail rapidly twitching with barely contained excitement. “This one was not aware that anything like it had been attempted before.”

“I will explain it to you further,” she said, “in exchange for a service. A foul darkness has defiled my temple at Kilkreath, and I wish for it to be purged.”

“Beg pardon,” said Cadwell, genuinely puzzled, “but isn’t this the kind of thing you send the beacon out for?”

Meridia paused, her expression unreadable. If Cadwell didn't know better, he would have thought she was embarrassed.

“I have sent out the beacon,” she finally said. “The one I have sent it to is ignoring it.”

“It’s possible to ignore the beacon?” It seemed about as likely to Cadwell as ignoring Meridia, face-to-face, while she was in full righteous lecture mode.

“He will not touch it,” said Meridia. “In fact, he will go to great lengths to avoid brushing against it, whether that be by using a sword as a lever to pry it out of the way, or simply leaving the moment he spies it out of the corner of his eye.”

“He knows exactly what it is,” said Raksha, thoughtfully. “And he is having none of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is what happens when I set out to write a nice gen Buddy Cop genre romp, Hot Fuzz but with soul shriven, then realize it's veering hard into slash with a pairing I didn't even think existed, and I tell my friends "help help the gen is turning gay with a ship no one ever asked for" and they respond "Idk the canon or any of the characters but we're never going to tell you to un-gay a thing, LET IT BE GAY". This is all your fault for enabling me, so it's dedicated to you. I hope you're happy!
> 
> Imagine my surprise, also, that this is not the first use of some of these tags. Rarepair shippers rush in where angels fear to tread. I salute you and your terrifying bravery.
> 
> Here's hoping I do an okay job writing sympathetic Meridia. Normally when everyone in the bar is singing "Meridia is perfect, Meridia has no flaws, Step On Me Shining One," I'm the shadowy hooded figure in the corner clutching a picture of Umaril the Unfeathered in a gloved fist. (Plot twist: the muttering under the hood turns out to be "notice me senpai".)


	2. Honey is Sweeter than Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to disastrous circumstances beyond my control, I've elected to release this chapter into the wild lightly self-edited but untouched by the eyes of a beta. Mostly because North is super busy, this chapter's a Long One, and I may be without a laptop for A While.

In the hold of Haafingar in the far northwest of Skyrim lie the Haafingar Mountains, and the greatest of the mountains in this range is Mount Kilkreath. At the summit of Mount Kilkreath, ancient Nords erected a temple in honor of the Daedric Prince of Light, Meridia. The site was marked by a monumental statue of the Prince, depicted as a broad-winged woman in robes with her hands raised in offering to the sun.

"The Temple has seen better days," mused Raksha, looking up from the base of the statue. "Khajiit could swear the birds were kinder to her visage in the Second Era."

"Harrowstorms do have a knack for driving off the wildlife," noted Cadwell, removing his knapsack from his shoulders and setting it on the ground. Honor pecked at a side pocket's flap until she succeeded in opening it and retrieving a blue dartwing as a snack.

The Khajiit sighed, testing his grip on the plain oak staff he'd brought. "Well, this should be a simpler matter than that. No vampires, only a foolish necromancer and his minions—this should take an hour at most, yes?"

"Meridia warned you not to get ahead of yourself," he replied as he retrieved a torch from his pack. "Malkoran isn't raising bog standard undead, he's—"

"Yes, yes," said Raksha, waving dismissively. "'He uses the power stored within my own token to fuel his foul deeds,' this one remembers her words well. But do forgive Raksha for not being impressed. Every poor necromancer seeks to bolster his lack of skill with an outside source."

“Speaking of which,” said Cadwell, slinging his pack back over his shoulders. “As we are here to rid Meridia’s temple of the necromantic element, it might be a good idea, perhaps, to _not use necromancy_ to do so.”

“This one shall do no such thing,” Raksha scoffed. “Meridia took no issue with this one’s talents when halting the Planemeld. Such unnecessary limits take a simple task and make it complicated without reason.”

“Not entirely without reason,” he said, uneasily. “Meridia and the undead are generally not on speaking terms.”

“Yet she remains on speaking terms with us,” said Raksha.

“Well,” said Cadwell, “that’s a point in favor of neither of us being undead, isn’t it? Clearly, in Meridia’s book, she’s marked soul shriven down as Something Else.”

“A compromise, then,” said the Khajiit, crossing his arms. “Raksha will gladly clear this entire temple without so much as a hint of the necromantic arts… if and _only if_ you, Cadwell, will put on a proper set of armor.”

Cadwell was, as usual, wearing a cast-iron pot as a helmet. He also had a pair of baking sheets strapped to his chest and back via leather straps punched through holes in said sheets, and a pair of shallow iron pans hanging from his belt on either side of his hips. Some iron salvers were strapped to his knees and elbows, a pair of cast iron grill presses had been hammered into shape to serve as partial vambraces, and a few metal serving plates had been similarly bent into shape and strapped on to serve as an off-hand spaulder.

“This is a proper set of armor,” he said, with the tiniest hint of pain in his voice.

Raksha simply gave him A Look and prodded with his staff at the unprotected cloth over his midsection.

“All right, so it’s a _little_ bit of a bodge,” Cadwell admitted. “Nothing a few extra bits and bobs can’t solve.”

“Or,” said Raksha, “you could put on a set of armor that was made by an actual blacksmith.”

"I could, I suppose, if we had the time for that." Cadwell started sauntering down the stone steps to the temple entrance. "But time is of the essence, you know, especially when necromancers—"

"Meridia did not specify a time limit," the Khajiit pointed out. "Solitude is a short journey to the east, and this one is sure she would forgive a detour to properly outfit her champion before he charges into battle with the darkness."

Honor chirped down at him from the top of the stairs.

"Not you, too," said Cadwell, as quietly as he could manage. "You know I can't—"

She squawked indignantly, and ran back to circle around Raksha's legs. The Khajiit smiled. "It would seem that Honor agrees with this one, this time."

Cadwell simply stood on the steps, staring down at the ground.

"All right," he said, finally. "You win. Use whatever magic you want." With that, he turned and resumed walking down the steps.

Raksha watched him leave quietly, his free hand at his chin. That was not the kind of response he would have ever expected from Cadwell.

"Do you have any idea what that's about?" he asked, looking down at the bantam guar by his feet.

Honor's only reply was a loud screech. Raksha grimaced. His fault for asking, of course: he was not sure why he should have expected anything more coherent.

☙

In the opposite direction from Skyrim, to the far south past Cyrodiil, lies the land of Elsweyr. During the time of the Third Aldmeri Dominion, the unified kingdom of Elsweyr had once again divided into Anequina and Pellitine, but before the Two Kingdoms, there had once been the Sixteen Kingdoms, and before even the Sixteen Kingdoms there had been the Sixteen Tribes. 

There is a lost tale of the mythic hero Khunzar-ri in the tribal land that would be Riverhold. It is a story told only by the spirits of the dead, and only when commanded by a powerful will. 

With a sigh like the wind whistling through tree branches, they would tell of the great Pahmar-raht and his Alfiq scribe travelling the savannah north of the river at midday. They would tell of how Khunzar-ri caught sight of a tree in the distance, and in his strange wisdom, seemed to see in it a great significance. Though his scribe could not see this tree herself, she did not question when he gestured for her to remain where she was and wait for him to return. 

They would tell of how empty the dry plains seemed to be as he moved through them, and how that emptiness was itself a warning. They would speak of how slowly even great Khunzar-ri had to move through the grass, how he froze in place when he caught the merest glimpse of the corner of a wicker mat sticking out of the soil. 

They would cluck in disapproval like the clattering of ancient bones as they described how Khunzar-ri could not help but marvel at the skill it must have required. The trapmaker had taken the time to cut under the sod while leaving the grass roots intact, then to move sod and grass aside to dig the senche pit that he knew laid below, and then transplanted it all back in place with only this one mistake. How many more pits like this lurked in the plain without even a wicker corner to show for it? 

Eventually Khunzar-ri emerged from the tall grass into a clearing surrounding the tree. The plucked corpse of a terror bird hung suspended from the sturdiest branch, held in place far from the trunk by an improvised rope pulley. A small fire pit had been built by the base of the tree; an unknown meat roasted on a spit above it, with a side hole to feed fresh air to the fire and allow access to the coals. On a nearby rock sat an old Nede in a ragged cloth gambeson, who reached forward with one hand to rotate the spit without seeming to acknowledge the Khajiit's arrival. 

“Bright moons and warm sands, walker,” said Khunzar-ri as he drew near, palms out in greeting. “This one apologizes for his silent approach. Someone has set a great many traps near here and it seemed like a shame to disturb them.”

The Nede glanced up briefly at the Khajiit. “It is a bit of a No Man’s Land,” he said with a sage nod before turning his attention back to the spit. “You’re lucky to have made it through at all. What brings you this far out, traveler?” 

“Khunzar-ri comes in search of a great hero,” said the Khajiit. “A clever warrior who has single-handedly kept the wild elves of Silorn from taking the rich fields of Rawla-Kei for their own.” 

“I’m afraid you won’t find any heroes out here,” the old man replied, wistfully scratching his beard. “Just a few hunting traps and some overly imaginative farmers.” 

“You may say that,” said Khunzar-ri, “but this one has heard too many incredible things to believe they are simply tall tales.” 

“Really.” He reached down to retrieve a long, thin stick from the ground by the fire pit’s side hole. "And what have you heard?" 

"Khunzar-ri has heard," he said, "that he is a man who thinks more like a Khajiit than a man." 

The man hummed noncommittally, poking at the outermost coals with the stick. "What does that mean, exactly?" 

Khunzar-ri gestured broadly with his hands, like a clan mother describing the birth of Nirni. "It means he is brave, for he wanders the dry plains and badlands alone without fear of bandit or beast. It means he is cunning, for those who have sought to kill him have died as often to his traps as to his blade." 

"Is that so." The stick slowly, lazily began to unearth a potato from the ashes. 

"Most importantly," continued the Khajiit, "it means he is a survivor, for at no point in this conversation has he taken his hand away from the knife in his boot." 

The stick stopped poking. The man did not move, not even to breathe. 

"You are welcome to unsheathe it and stand up straight, if you wish," Khunzar-ri said, cheerfully. "It must be very difficult to be so ready to defend yourself while hunched over pretending to do something else." 

In one smooth motion, he had risen and turned to face the Khajiit in a low fighting stance, left foot forward. He still held the stick in front of him, a dagger drawn in his right hand with its blade pointing down and back. 

"There!" The Khajiit clapped with hearty approval. "Isn't that so much more comfortable?" 

"You," said the Nede, "have got _some nerve_."

"Khunzar-ri has heard that before many times," he replied. 

His eyebrows furrowed, and he adjusted his grip on his dagger. "I can't say I know all the ins and outs of how you cats address each other, but—have I been hearing it right, that your name is Khunzar with a title of 'ri'?" 

"What you have heard is true," said Khunzar-ri, shaking his mane proudly. "You have good ears for a man!" 

"I thought 'ri' was only for kings and holy men," said the man. "You're clearly not either." 

"You stay your blade and yet you wound this one," said the Khajiit, ears akimbo with mock offense. "Khunzar-ri is a great hero, of whom tales will be told as long as there are moons in the sky." 

"There's no such thing as heroes," the Nede said, bitterly. "There's only the living and the dead." 

"This is true as well," said Khunzar-ri, nodding. "'Life is suffering born of desire and desire is born from illusion,' as many an adept is taught. But if that is the case, then it cannot be avoided, and Khunzar-ri would rather suffer from a beautiful illusion than an ugly one." 

The Nede stared at him, bewildered, but he looked Khunzar-ri in the eyes and saw that he was sincere. His stance softened and he lowered the stick. The dagger remained in his hand for some time still, but the spirits would insist that even before Khunzar-ri spoke of the demons from the north, an understanding had been reached, as subtle as Azurah's secrets. 

These are the words, and the words are true. 

☙ 

It seemed as though Malkoran had put a lot of faith into “I locked the doors, now no one can get in.” As a defense strategy, this seemed a bit dodge, given a Daedric Prince should probably be able to unlock the doors of her own temple. Yet on his way down the entrance hall to the narthex, Cadwell encountered no resistance. The only sign of necromantic activity was a black mist swirling across the floor, knee deep and thick with the scent of putrefaction. 

Well, there was also an Imperial soldier’s corpse slouched against the wall. He had seen better days, certainly, but did not rise to greet visitors, as it were. Cadwell had given him a poke with his torch just to be sure. Burned silently, patiently, not so much as a peep. If he was undead, he was perfectly content with being set on fire and crumbling to ash. Relatable, honestly. Cadwell had definitely been there before. 

A beam of light streamed in through a hole in the roof—like sunlight, but at the same time not, as usual for Meridia—hitting a reflective prism on a pedestal in the center of the narthex. It wasn’t too much trouble to adjust it and redirect the light to another prism set high in the far wall. The moment he had it lined up, he could hear the satisfying rapid-fire clicking of tumbler pins slotting into place before the doors below the prism opened. 

As he passed through the doors and down the stairs, he saw that the doors leading into the nave were open, and he could hear a sound coming from it that was somewhere between spitting oil on a griddle and a death rattle. Maybe Malkoran wasn’t so careless after all. 

Cadwell readied his sword, steeled himself, and charged into the nave. A pair of armored shades were waiting but still caught by surprise: he bashed one in the face with his torch before either had a chance to raise their swords. As he’d hoped, it burst into flames and fell to the ground with a crackling scream. 

The second shade’s red eyes flared and it swung its blade. He caught it on the flat of his sword at an angle, deflecting the strike, and slid down to do a leg sweep. On the way down, he realized the shade had no legs. He gave himself a fraction of a second to mentally kick himself as he repurposed his motion to slice through the shade’s hovering ribcage from below. 

By the time he had stood up again, the first shade had burned to ash, and the second had disintegrated with a cry, its sword and helm clattering to the ground amid a pile of its remains. 

_Was that all?_ he thought to himself as he stared down at the two piles. 

The familiar whistle of an arrow passed by his ear, as if to answer him. He spun to face the archer. It was already aiming another arrow; before it could fire, it was struck by lightning. It fell backward, smoking, and the fetid air was filled with a pungent sting, like a splash of aqua regia. 

“You are fortunate that missed,” said Raksha, his free hand glowing with magic. Honor scurried in behind him with an upset screech. 

“Jolly good timing,” said Cadwell, turning back with a smile. “Though one arrow probably would have been all right. After all, I have a legendary healer with me, don’t I?” 

“Yes, and that’s why you are fortunate,” he said. “The ‘best’ arrow injuries are the ones that pass straight through. An arrow that lodges itself in place has to be carefully cut out before healing. Others shatter on impact with bone and have to be picked out splinter by tiny splinter.” He dismissed the glow with a flick of his hand. “Please, do Raksha a favor and avoid injuries that require messy emergency surgery.” 

“Honestly, friend, if it’s ever that bad,” said Cadwell, “You have my permission to just blast me to pieces. Takes less time, trust me.” 

“Don’t joke about such things,” said Raksha, sternly. 

“I’m being completely serious,” he replied, putting a hand over his heart. “I don’t know how many times I’ve broken an arm or a leg, and while I could set the thing and wear a splint for months, one leap off the Cliffs of Failure and I’ll be right as rain in no time.” 

“Raksha very much doubts you do much leaping with a broken leg,” he said, unamused. 

“Well, it _is_ more of an undignified crawl,” Cadwell admitted. “But it gets the job done.” 

The Khajiit shook his head. “This one understands what you are saying, but one time was already too many for him.” 

“One time was—? Oh!” His eyes widened with realization. “Terribly sorry, old friend. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” 

“There’s no reason it should,” replied Raksha, walking past him to the prism pedestal in the chancel. “You have no memory of it.” 

The beginning of the conversation tended to vary but the end was always the same. Apologies—Hadn’t even thought of it—Not your fault, you don’t remember. Sometimes Raksha would carry on with his business, sometimes Cadwell would change the subject, but they would never actually talk about the mammoth in the room. That was how Cadwell preferred it. 

As he watched Raksha rotate the prism into position, he wondered if Meridia had always known. 

The path beyond the main doors out of the chancel to the vestry and sanctum were blocked by rubble, but a side door off the nave offered an alternative route of winding corridors, still lined with rugs and ragged tapestries, leading to the banquet hall. Their arrival was greeted by the charge of one shade and an archer taking aim from the mezzanine. A sword to the ribcage and a blast of lightning sorted this out. The prism pedestal sat on a tall platform whose walkway from the mezzanine had crumbled centuries earlier, but the gap was small, at least by Cadwell’s standards—he leapt across with the ease and grace of a traveling acrobat performing a routine. 

“If this is the best Malkoran has to offer,” Cadwell said as he turned the prism, “you might be right about taking less than an hour.” 

“Raksha has been doing this a very long time,” replied the Khajiit, “and he has only seen the standards for necromancy lower over that time. Even the remnants of the Worm Cult degraded into a focus on quantity over quality.” 

“That works out best for you, though, doesn’t it?” He effortlessly vaulted back across. “Bit of an understatement to say you were never fond of Mannimarco, after all.” 

“When Raksha was young, he used to admire him,” he said in a level voice. “His parents were wise enough to discourage him from revealing his talent to the Mages Guild, but it left Khajiit with no context. Until he discovered the forbidden writings of Mannimarco, it felt as if he was the only one in the world who could hear the song of bones.” 

Cadwell considered this for a moment as he pulled open the doors leading out to the balcony. The last time Raksha had spoken at length about Mannimarco, he had just returned to Coldharbour in the wake of a trip to Hammerfell. On the one hand, he had arrived by Psijic portal rather than by death and plasm-accretion, which was an encouraging sign. On the other hand, he was singed and exhausted, clearly fresh out of battle, and flat-out ranting about “five Big Walkers,” months condensed into a single day, and similar impossibilities. The most Cadwell had been able to decipher at the time was that Mannimarco was now simultaneously a lich, an ascended god, and a pile of ashes Raksha had dumped into the Iliac Bay. 

“I always thought your talent was for Restoration,” he said as they walked outside, Honor scurrying ahead of them and over the bridge. 

The Khajiit shrugged. “To Raksha, they have always been two sides of the same coin. His first act of necromancy was trying to heal a wounded frog as a ja’khajiit, not realizing the frog had already died. The Guild always drew hard lines between schools while it existed, but the reality of magic is more complicated than that.” 

Cadwell nodded. “Makes sense. You can use a knife to cook or you can use it to murder someone. People usually frown on the second, but that’s not really the knife’s fault, is it?” 

“Exactly,” said Raksha. “Necromancy itself is not some terrible thing that forever determines who a person is.” He tapped the stones with his staff as they walked, almost emphasizing his words. “To a young student, the tale of Vastarie braving the dangers of Coldharbour to retrieve the first black soul gems seemed heroic and admirable. When Raksha met the woman later, sworn in service to Azurah, she lived up to his youthful expectations.” 

“Meridia’s still not a fan of it,” noted Cadwell. 

“Her perspective is not based in the reasons of mortals,” he replied, “so Raksha will disagree, but always respectfully.” 

Cadwell did not respond to this, mainly because he wasn’t sure Meridia’s reasons _were_ any better than those of mortals. It could have been the association with Molag Bal, creator of vampires and sundry other beasties. It could have been a lingering fondness for Arkay from sometime during the creation of the Mundus. For all he knew, she hated necromancy for the smell of it. 

Bantam guar lack the ability to open doors, sadly, so Honor greeted their arrival up the steps with an especially displeased cry of impatience. This particular door brought them into the lowest level of the meeting hall, where they were once again enthusiastically welcomed by shades—an almost endearing group of mixed Imperials and Stormcloaks charged as archers took aim at them from a caged walkway above, as if to demonstrate what a united Skyrim would be like if no one had skin. Or legs. 

United Skyrim did not last very long, much like the real thing, and soon Raksha was staring out past the smoking piles of ash, fingers curled pensively in front of his mouth as he considered the hall layout. One pedestal platform was easily reached by walking up a pair of stairs, and Cadwell was already taking care of that. It was the second platform on the same level, and a third platform even higher in the hall, that were going to be an issue. The caged walkways would prevent Cadwell from leaping and it was questionable whether the rusty cages would support his weight if he attempted to climb them. Finding a route around might lead to the two platforms, but they might also lead only to dead ends in rubble-blocked passages. 

“It seems there is only one way to do this quickly,” said Raksha, looking up at the platform. “One that any mage worth his salt should be able to manage.” 

“You don’t have to do that,” Cadwell insisted, scrambling down the stairs. He knew exactly what was being suggested, and it had never gone well. Not once in a thousand years. 

Raksha said nothing in reply. Instead, he spread his arms out to either side, raised his chin high, and shut his eyes. The Khajiit seemed to wince with concentration, eyelids twitching as he rose into the air one excruciating fraction of an inch at a time. Cadwell held his breath and crossed his fingers, but also set his torch down on a rock and moved closer. 

Levitation was extremely illegal, having been banned in 3E 421. That wasn’t the issue, of course. The laws of the Empire had always seemed to be more polite suggestions to Raksha, fables with the ultimate moral of “don’t do it where the guards can see you,” and Meridia herself could care less about mortal conventions. The main issue was that Raksha and Alteration Magic did not get along with each other. At all. 

When he had managed to rise chest-high to the platform, his upward movement came to a premature stop. His arms trembled. He grimaced with effort. And then he began to fall. 

Raksha’s eyes flew open with a pained gasp and he threw himself forward. His legs and tail flailed around as his arms and hands grasped at the ledge. The stones screamed with the sound of his claws trying to find purchase, then were quickly replaced by the sound of his own anguished cry as he slid past the edge and plummeted toward the ground. 

Cadwell was ready, knees bending to absorb momentum when he caught the Khajiit face-up in his outstretched arms. Raksha’s immediate response was an enraged hiss, ears flattened back hard enough to almost vanish into his scalp. 

“That went better than last time,” said Cadwell, flinching slightly. He knew the hiss wasn’t meant for him, but it had still sent a spray of angry khajiit saliva right into his face. 

“Why?” cried the Khajiit, almost screaming in frustration. “Why can Raksha never manage _such a simple thing?_ ” His tail had inflated to full volume, thrashing around wildly. “His tiny Alfiq father could do this in his sleep!” 

Fortunately Raksha’s tail was more fur than muscle, given how it beat the front of Cadwell’s knees and thighs. “Can’t say I know much about magic,” he said, “but I’d imagine a tiny Alfiq weighs much less than you do.” 

Raksha crossed his arms tightly. “Weight has nothing to do with it. This one’s father once levitated a full cargo ship from one end of the Senchal harbor to the other, just because he could.” 

“Maybe,” he said, as gently as he could, “you shouldn’t compare yourself to someone who makes ships fly for fun.” 

Honor squawked at some point below Raksha’s rapidly jerking tail, hopping in place for emphasis. 

“That would be Honor agreeing with you,” he said, sourly. 

“Actually,” said Cadwell, looking away with a small cough, “She’s swearing that she’ll peck my shins off if I carry you like a rescued princess through all of Kilkreath.” 

Raksha’s tail froze. His scowl on his face was slowly replaced by dawning realization and mild embarrassment. 

"It's probably for the best," he added, lowering the Khajiit's feet to the ground and steadying him as he stood up. "You are going to be furious about this." 

"Furious about what—" 

With a flash of light and a whiff of displaced air, Cadwell was suddenly no longer right next to Raksha. 

"Sorry," he called down from the platform, already adjusting the prism. "You can't say I didn't try to warn you!" 

The Khajiit's ears twitched, his tail quivered, and the scowl returned with reinforcements. 

☙ 

Khunzar-ri had told him that he was forming something called a _kra'jun_ —“a company of heroes”, he had translated it. His definition of hero, apparently, included an ornately dressed Altmer with a knife and seemingly nothing else, and a scowling Nord with a long scar across her face who clearly did not want to be there. 

“This is foolishness,” said the Nord in thickly accented Nedic, sweeping a hand across her shaved scalp in irritation. “This is not enough to take down many _dovah_. It is barely enough to take down one. What is this cat planning to do, kill the stragglers like we’re whittling down an elk herd?” 

“What a cheerful disposition you have, my dear,” the Altmer said, wryly. “I’m sure victory is all but guaranteed by such incredible optimism.” 

“I am not ‘your dear’, elf,” said the Nord, “I am Flinthild Yah-Diiv, and I serve here so this stubborn cat will leave our greatest alone. We have our own fight in Skyrim. Our Tongues have no time to waste on the cowardly and weak _dovah_ who fled in terror when _Miraak Dovahkiin_ shouted Vithviinmul down and ate his heart.” 

“Well, _Flinthild_ , that makes it sound like we’re very fortunate,” replied the elf, one ring-adorned hand raised before his mouth as a half-smile crossed his lips. “After all, if these are specifically the cowardly and the weak, perhaps a party of five is more than enough to take them down.” 

"It might be possible," Flinthild said, "if it were five warriors that didn't include a smug milkdrinker like you." 

He sniffed. "What do you Nords have against milk?" 

The Nede couldn't get a word in edgewise, only watch the two of them snipe back and forth. To his relief, the fourth member of the kra'jun chose this time to intervene. 

"Friend Nurarion, Honored Flinthild," she said, gently, "There is no need to fight among us. We are all here to achieve the same goal, are we not? We should save our ire for the demons, who have more than earned it." 

She was a sleek, black-furred Khajiit woman—he was unfamiliar with the names of all the types, but she stood at around the same size as a man or elf, half the height of the towering Khunzar-ri. When he had overheard her speak with Khunzar-ri and his scribe in Ta'agra, he'd managed to pick out that her name was Ne Quin-al Rass Le; but when she spoke to him in slightly lilting but otherwise flawless Nedic, she had introduced herself as Anequina Sharp-Tongue. 

"We all wish to see the demons defeated," said Anequina. "Soon we will all be able to discuss our means and strategy, but for now, we must rest. It has taken some time to build this kra'jun and our Nede friend has had to travel a long distance to meet us. Do not worry, the demons and our differences will still be here in the morning." 

They had provided him with a tent of his own. It felt massive. He could stand up without hitting his head. He could turn his bedroll in any direction and it would fit. The fabric was thick enough to keep in heat after sunset, and it muffled the sounds of the desert outside. 

He hadn't expected to sleep well his first night at a camp full of strangers, but this was even worse. It was much too quiet. His mind kept trying to fill in the gap with footsteps on stone, a blade leaving its sheath, muttering in coarse Ayleidoon. 

He gave up and left the tent. It was just not happening. 

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that Khunzar-ri was up—it only made sense that someone should keep watch while the others slept. He sat on the ground, face turned to the sky, holding a flask in one hand. He looked pensive. Serious. The sort of expression he knew to leave alone, and yet. 

Against his better judgement, the Nede walked over. Khunzar-ri's gaze shifted to look him in the eyes, and his face brightened, a wide smile taking over so completely that he wondered if he'd imagined the whole thing. 

"Fragrant walker!" he greeted him, somehow managing intensity without volume. "You have come to help Khunzar-ri watch the moons and drink rum, yes?" 

"Can't say I've ever watched the moons before," the Nede replied, "but if there's rum involved, I'll give it a shot." 

He settled next to Khunzar-ri on the ground, accepted the flask when the Khajiit handed it to him, and took a large swig before handing it back. Warmth spread through him almost immediately, and he sighed with relief. 

"That," he said, "is the best drink I've had in years." 

"There is nothing like moon sugar rum," said Khunzar-ri. "Truly a blessing of Azurah." 

“Well, I’ll thank her if I ever see her.” He leaned back on his hands and looked up. “Anything in particular you were looking for?” 

The Khajiit laughed and took a drink. “Not as such, no. It is more that this one feels it is a good idea to check in with Jone and Jode every now and then, just to get a feel for what is usual for them. Otherwise, how will he know when something is different?” 

He hummed and nodded. “Takes some getting used to your names for them, I have to admit. Jode is… the larger one, right?” 

“He is the larger twin, yes,” said Khunzar-ri, nodding. 

“Funny how you say ‘Jone and Jode,’” said the Nede, “with the smaller moon first. In Cyrod, it’s always ‘Masser and Secunda’—the larger goes first.” 

He laughed again. “Khunzar-ri never thought of it that way,” he said, and passed the flask, as if to reward him with alcohol. “You may be onto something, friend. The love of Jone and Jode are like the love of an Alfiq and Senche-raht. The Alfiq must be considered first, for what is strength if it is not careful with what it loves?” 

He suspected there was something lost in translation there, as the moons had seemingly gone from being twins one minute to lovers the next. Presumably. Then again, they were also supposed to be gods, and gods had a knack for demanding unwavering obedience to edicts they never followed themselves. 

The Nede was always keenly aware of the size difference between him and the Pahmar-raht. Not in a fearful way. The larger they are, the bigger the bull’s-eye on the target, so to speak. The rum might have been starting to hit him a bit harder than expected, though, as he realized that the decorative bands on the Khajiit’s otherwise bare arms were probably larger around than his own head. 

He took another large swig and handed the flask back. _It’s the rum,_ he told himself as he forced his gaze to the sky and refused to let them linger on the tiger-stripes of Khunzar-ri’s chest. 

Rum was like a bucket from the bottom of an old well. It always brought up water; there was no knowing what else it might bring. Sometimes the bucket came up with a gold ring. Sometimes it came up with a ruined book. A rusted dagger. An infant’s skull. 

“I honestly don’t belong here,” he found himself saying, the words hurling themselves out of his mouth without warning. 

Khunzar-ri stopped mid-drink and looked at him with concern. “You belong as much as any other hero in the kra’jun. Each one of you is a legend without parallel.” 

“You say that,” said the Nede, “but Flinthild wasn’t your first choice, was she? You settled for her because the priest you’d hoped for wasn’t available.” 

“Flinthild was not who Khunzar-ri set out to find, no,” he admitted. “But sometimes what you find during the search is far better than what you seek. She may think of herself as less, but it is truer to say that she is simply different—and, this one suspects, exactly what this kra’jun needs.” 

“Right, but my point still stands. You went looking for me, but maybe you should’ve found someone else.” He sighed with the weight of years. “You could easily find someone younger with the same skills. Maybe not at the same level, but good enough.” 

“You are far from the oldest of the kra’jun, friend,” replied Khunzar-ri. “You would not know by looking at him, but Nurarion has been alive for almost two centuries.” 

“He's an elf,” he grumbled. “It's different for them.” 

“Khunzar-ri knows many things,” said the Khajiit, “and often, it seems, when people speak of age, they are using it to talk around something else.” 

The Nede smiled, though the smile did not touch his eyes. “And what am I talking around, then?” 

“Khajiit cannot say,” said Khunzar-ri with a shrug. “It is different every time. He always needs to ask the one speaking before he understands.” His golden eyes widened. “Which, he realizes now, is the lesson he needs to remember. This one should be asking you what you mean when you say you do not belong.” 

“You wouldn’t get it,” he said, the smile staying rigidly in place. 

“If you make an attempt, and Khunzar-ri does not understand at all, there is nothing lost, is there? You will have only proved your point.” He offered the flask again. 

The Nede stared at the flask a moment, then looked at Khunzar-ri. He was also smiling slightly, but there seemed to be just the tiniest glint of worry in his eyes. 

“I’ll give it a shot,” he said, taking the flask, “but I can’t promise it’ll make any sense.” 

Khunzar-ri watched silently as the Nede knocked back the largest gulp of rum yet, finishing with a loud gasp for air. 

“Imagine,” he said, wiping his mouth, “that you were born at the bottom of a pit. Everyone you know has been born at the bottom of this pit. Everyone lives and dies at the bottom of the pit. You decide that you're not going to do that. You're going to do whatever it takes to claw your way out of the pit, even if it kills you. You climb until your nails rip out, you climb until your fingers break, you climb until your arms pull out of their sockets, and you keep going. 

“Then you finally make it out. You see the sun for the first time and it's blinding. And you find out that you're old. You find out that people your age who aren't born in a pit and never expect to be in a pit, they got their ducks in a row decades ago. They have husbands and wives and children and grandchildren. They have beds and hobbies and favorite foods. They might regret the choices they made when they were young and stupid, but _they got to be young and stupid._

“And everyone looks at you and the wrinkles on your face and assumes you're the same. They can't even imagine the pit. It just doesn't exist to them. And you get so tired of having to explain it, it's like you're climbing out all over again.” 

“Then don't explain it,” said Khunzar-ri. “If another looks upon you and makes a false assumption, it is suffering that comes from an illusion, but that will always be true, even with great understanding. So let them have their illusion and pity their attachment to it, for it has cost them dearly.” 

“Then I’m just getting by on a lie of omission,” said the Nede. “If I don’t explain, they just keep on assuming I’ve had the life they think I’ve had, and I have to roll with that. Everyone’s confused when I don’t know something Everyone Knows. No one takes it seriously when I know something they don’t. It’s a constant pain in the arse, and it’s easier to just…” He made some awkward hand gestures with his free hand, eventually giving up with a sigh and another drink of rum. 

“Khunzar-ri will not deny that it sounds difficult and painful,” he said, “but far from convincing him that you do not belong, your story only confirms his belief that this kra’jun needs you.” 

“Are you sure you heard it right?” asked the Nede, flatly. 

“It is your escape from the pit that has shaped you into the hero you are today,” said Khunzar-ri. “Your wits are like the finest steel, forged in the hottest fires. You possess knowledge beyond that found in the greatest depths of Hermorah’s realm, for even if another were to be told of it, their understanding it cannot be guaranteed. What better choice of hero is there, to stand at Khunzar-ri’s side and help him battle demons as old as Alkosh himself?” 

“You keep calling me a hero,” he said, “and I keep trying to tell you that I’m not one.” 

“In your illusion, heroes do not exist,” replied the Khajiit, “and since you exist, you must not be a hero. But in Khunzar-ri’s illusion, heroes do not exist, and therefore we must create them, for all things begin in nothingness before they come into being.” 

He stared in bewilderment at the Khajiit, his only reply being a slow and pointed drink from the flask. 

“Khunzar-ri knows what he says sounds strange,” he said, bringing his arm up around the Nede’s back and resting a hand on his far shoulder. “But you will learn to understand what he means in time.” 

“An old dog can't learn new tricks,” he told him, eyeing the hand resting on his shoulder. 

“Then this one has fortunate news for you, friend,” Khunzar-ri replied, grinning ear to ear. “For you are not a dog!” 

_I've been called one more than enough,_ he wanted to say, but found himself chuckling in spite of himself. 

“That's the spirit,” Khunzar-ri said, patting his shoulder again. “Do not let yourself be bound by the illusions of others! You have fought through many a dark time and survived to tell the tale, have you not? And you have many more tales before you are done, Khunzar-ri is certain.” 

The Nede had no idea how this Khajiit could touch him and his gut hadn’t immediately urged him to shove a knife through his wrist. This was a magic that rum had never accomplished before, even when he had wanted it to. 

He passed the flask back. 

“Khunzar-ri was not born in a pit,” he said, taking the flask, “but he, too, did not get to be young and foolish, for he was raised in a box.” 

He stared at him, confused and not entirely sure if he should blame the rum for this, too. “A box?” 

“Yes, a temple offering box,” said Khunzar-ri. “He was placed in it just after birth, and it was just the right size for a ja'khajiit, so to live in his box, little Khunzar had to stay small and never grow. 

“And then, during a great storm, the lid of the box was blown off by a wind sent by Khenarthi herself. Little Khunzar seized the moment and leapt out. In that instant he ceased to be little Khunzar and became Khunzar-ri, and he would never fit into the box again.” A mischievous twitch of his whiskers. “That is why abbots never like poor Khunzar-ri. They are happiest when the offering remains in the box, no?” 

“Can’t say I know many abbots,” replied the Nede, wearily. “Where I’m from, it’s…” It took him a minute to remember. “Exarchs.” 

“Different words,” said the Khajiit, “for very similar things.” He looked up at the moons again, a yearning look in his eyes, but said nothing more. His companion did not speak up to fill the silence. 

At some point when Khunzar-ri turned to offer the flask to the Nede again, his eyes were shut, his breath slow and even. He'd fallen asleep on the Pahmar-raht's arm, head curled into the crook of his elbow. 

Khunzar-ri took another drink of rum and let him sleep. 

☙ 

Raksha’s pride had managed to recover somewhat by the time Cadwell had returned from the third platform at the highest level of the hall. His whiskers were still twitching as they descended through the unlocked doors into the catacombs, but even this faded away when they caught sight of the open door to the final chamber. 

Cadwell drew his sword and started to approach, and the Khajiit grabbed him by the shoulder. 

“Hold on,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “As uncreative as he has been, Malkoran himself may be a different matter from his minions. We must be ready for the tricks of the trade, as it were.” He gripped Cadwell’s shoulder tightly, his claws almost digging into the cloth. “Let Raksha take care of the dead. You must be the one to kill Malkoran, but you must do so only by the blade.” 

He looked at the Khajiit, a quizzical eyebrow raised. "Isn't that what I've been doing?" 

"You have been setting the shades on fire with the torch,” he replied. “And it’s been a good strategy. It works well and there’s been no need for you to change. If you have no choice, do not hesitate, but—if you can manage it, try to fight Malkoran without burning him as well.” 

Cadwell smiled and patted Raksha's hand. “I'll give it my best shot, then.” 

“That is all this one asks for,” he said, releasing him. 

He quietly gestured a ward into place with his hand, nodded to Cadwell, and dashed down and through the door. He immediately drew the attention of the largest group of shades they’d encountered so far. A black-hooded mage was facing away, his attention focused on a pedestal where the prism light terminated; he turned with a jolt as Raksha ran in, seemingly not expecting the intrusion. 

Raksha raised his staff as he ran, barely catching sight of a bantam guar scurrying underfoot. With a sigh, he deftly scooped Honor up with one hand, raising her up to his shoulder as he slammed his staff into the stone floor. A lightning storm swirled around them, the screams of the dead mixing with Honor’s insulted cry. 

“This would not be an issue,” said Raksha, twisting to blast a shade outside the storm, “if you would wait outside.” 

She huffed with a gesture that, in a bird, would probably involve ruffled chest feathers. 

The necromancer readied a javelin of ice, taking aim at the Khajiit. A loud cry of “What ho!” suddenly drew his attention and he turned in a heartbeat, hurling it at the source. 

“You must be Malkoran,” said Cadwell, cheerfully dodging out of the way. “Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. Sir Cadwell of Codswallop, at your service.” 

“Meridia’s sending madmen now, I take it,” replied Malkoran, eyeing the pot on Cadwell’s head. A floating shard of ice hovered menacingly above the mage’s palm. 

“Mad? I’ve hardly even broken a sweat.” Cadwell slowly circled around him, torch raised to block and sword ready to strike. “Anyway, chivalry demands a reminder—if you lay down your arms and beg the Bright Lady for forgiveness, she may let you live.” 

“I’m familiar with the routine,” said Malkoran dryly, flinging the shard of ice to the ground in an explosion of razor-sharp ice crystals. 

As he released the spell, he watched the wall of emerging ice spikes race forward through absolutely nothing at all, and heard the sound of steel whistling through the air behind him. Malkoran quickly spun around to block the strike with his staff, wood chipping as the sword’s edge embedded in it. 

“I see you’re no ordinary fool of Meridia’s,” he said, both hands shaking from the force of the blow. “I’ve never seen portal magic before where the portal wasn’t even visible.” 

“Oh, I can do standard portals,” said Cadwell with a grin. “But it gets a bit stale doing the same thing for a thousand years without changing it up a bit, doesn’t it?” 

“A thousand—!” Something like fear flickered in Malkoran’s eyes; he kicked Cadwell in the hip, letting go of the staff as he was thrown back and off-balance. “She did not send men to fight me; she sent Daedra!” 

“Soul shriven,” he corrected, casually touching the torch to the staff. “It’s an easy mistake to make, granted. A lot of people don’t know the difference.” He gave his sword a shake, and the burning wood of the staff split in two. “Important thing to remember is: Daedra have always been Daedra, but soul shriven used to be mortal.” 

“I suppose I should be flattered,” replied Malkoran, his hands tracing glowing patterns in the air before him. “Even a Prince must acknowledge that mortal champions are no match for me.” 

“Well, to be honest,” said Cadwell, “her first choice just couldn’t be bothered.” 

The necromancer’s eyes flared with outrage and the patterns in his hands tore apart, forming an opaque vortex of ice swirling closely around him. 

“A frost cloak, eh?” Cadwell stepped back with a nod, an inches-wide circle of light forming in front of him. “Well, you _were_ wondering about the portals, after all.” 

Malkoran had enough time to furrow his brows in confusion before Cadwell thrust his sword into the circle of light and it re-emerged within the vortex, splinters of ice flying inward as it angled up under the necromancer’s ribcage and into his heart. The swirling petered away, and his lifeless body crumpled to the ground as Cadwell withdrew his sword and dismissed both ends of the portal. 

“Any shades left?” he asked Raksha as Honor leapt from the Khajiit’s shoulder to the ground. 

“Just the one,” said Malkoran. 

Cadwell turned back in time to see a shrouded black skeleton forming out of mist rising from Malkoran’s corpse, like steam from a cup of tea. He stepped back slowly, retreating to Raksha’s side. The Khajiit did not seem fazed by this. 

“Was this part of your plan?” he whispered. 

“Yes,” he replied, eyes never leaving the shade before them. 

“You fools,” continued Malkoran’s shade, red eyes glowing with malice. “Did you not realize you were fighting a master necromancer? You cannot hope to—” 

“A ‘master’ necromancer?” Raksha scoffed, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “Nothing you have done today is above the level of an adept.” 

The shade glared at him, its eyes becoming beams of the purest frustration. “Who are you to insult me? You will pay for this!” 

The Khajiit’s only response was to gesture silently—an upward grasping motion with his free hand—and slowly, the body of Malkoran began to rise and stumble to its feet as Malkoran’s shade stared in abject horror. 

“You can’t do that!” it cried. “That’s _my_ body.” 

“You call yourself a necromancer,” said Raksha with a sigh, “and yet you have forgotten that soul and body are not an entity and its vessel, but twins bound together by fate.” He waved his hand in a casual gesture towards the two. “Malkoran, it’s time to fight your own worst enemy: Malkoran.” 

No sooner had he said this than the body summoned a spear of ice in one hand and lunged at the shade. It managed to only partially dodge the attack, the spear clipping its upper arm with a tearing of the shroud and a cry of pain. 

“Stop,” demanded the shade, clutching its arm, “I command you! You are mine and you will do as I—” 

Malkoran’s body grabbed the shade by the spine just below its head and slammed it into the ground hard enough to hear bone cracking. Cadwell couldn’t help but wince in sympathy. That looked like it _hurt_. 

“Are you doing that?” Cadwell asked Raksha, who shook his head, holding a single raised finger in front of his mouth. 

Malkoran’s body bent over the shade with one hand crackling with icicles like knives. The shade’s hands desperately wove the pattern of a ward in time to block an attempt to stab through the shade’s skull. 

“Mercy!” cried the shade, its ward holding but only barely. “I surrender! I will beg Meridia for forgiveness, _please_.” 

“What say you?” asked Raksha, nodding to Malkoran’s body. “Can this one trust your soul to keep his word?” 

The body shook its head, and made no motion to stop. 

“How unfortunate,” he said. “But you would know him better than anyone else.” He lifted his hand and sent a series of small sparks toward Malkoran’s shade—not enough to cause significant damage, but enough to tip the scales and overwhelm the ward. Malkoran’s body wasted no time, thrusting the icicles down unseen into the shroud with a surprisingly wet crunch. 

The shade broke apart, dissolving with the fading black mist on the ground. 

Malkoran’s body stood up, its hand dripping with melting ice. It did nothing for a moment, then glanced up at Raksha, as if asking for instructions. 

“It is now your decision,” said Raksha to the body. “What do you wish for yourself?” 

The body stared at him a moment, disbelief written all over Malkoran’s bloodless face. The Khajiit simply nodded at him, as if to say “yes, really”. It looked to the side, seeming to consider the idea, then walked over to Cadwell, grabbed the lit end of his torch with its dry hand, and brought it back towards itself, lighting its own chest and head on fire. Cadwell stared in amazement as Malkoran’s body stumbled back and rubbed the flames down its robes, spreading the fire as throughly as possible, before it let out a gargling sigh of relief and fell in a charred pile to the floor.

“It is done,” came the voice of Meridia, unseen yet suddenly filling the room. “The defiler is defeated. Take—” 

“You were watching that?” said Cadwell, incredulously. 

“I was, yes, and I am pleased,” said Meridia, “for Cord-Eater used Malkoran’s own arts to force him to teach himself the error of his ways, and then allowed his mortal shell to cleanse itself with fire. This is fitting.” 

Raksha had been startled as well by Meridia’s sudden declaration, his eyes wide and ears back with surprise, but he straightened and even preened a bit at this remark. To be fair, it was high praise coming from Meridia. 

“Your promised duty is not complete, however,” she continued. “Take Dawnbreaker from its pedestal, Cadwell.” 

He stiffened, his expression suddenly very serious, and looked up at the beam of light terminating in the Dawnstar Gem in the sword’s guard. 

“The corruption’s been dealt with,” he said, “It’s safe now. We can leave it here or you can take it back yourself.” 

“That is not what I sent you here to do,” replied Meridia. “You were to defeat Malkoran and also to retrieve Dawnbreaker. Take up the mighty Dawnbreaker, Cadwell.” 

“I’ve already told you I can’t,” said Cadwell, wincing, “I shouldn’t.” 

Raksha’s gaze shifted worriedly back and forth between Cadwell and the pedestal. Honor stood by his ankle, unusually quiet, tilting her head as if weighing the situation carefully. 

“I understand the reasons behind your reluctance,” Meridia said, with something in her voice that was almost gentle, “but I have judged you worthy, and it is my judgement as well that you have need of my light and its power.” 

The Khajiit’s ears perked up at this, recognizing what he hoped was a hint intended for him. 

“Her Radiance has a point,” said Raksha. “The plan requires infiltrating Heart’s Grief a second time. The power of Dawnbreaker would be an unparalleled aid in accomplishing this.” 

Cadwell looked back at him, a pained look in his eyes. “Couldn’t you take it, then?” 

He shook his head. “Raksha is not a swordsman. He would not be able to use it as it is intended. He might be able to channel its power with great effort, but even then, it is not certain he would be able to stab even a stationary object with it.” 

Honor stood at attention and yelled loudly, the tip of her tail quivering with righteous intent. 

“You don’t have _hands_ ,” said Cadwell with a sigh. 

He took a deep breath and walked up to the pedestal. He slowly wrapped his hand around the hilt, like an executioner expecting a last minute pardon to arrive at the chopping block. 

“I’m bringing it back here,” he said, “the instant we don’t need it anymore. Just so we’re clear on this.” 

With that, Cadwell drew Dawnbreaker from its resting place, and everything was light. 

☙ 

“What weapon is that?” asked Anequina, staring at the various pieces and her eyes focusing on one. 

“Hm?” He followed her gaze to the middle of his bedroll, reaching over axes and daggers to pick up a crude spiked weapon. “Do you mean this?” 

“Yes, that one,” she said. The air felt colder, even, from the moment his hand had touched it. 

“It's a mace,” he said, tilting it back and forth in his hand to test its weight. “A... souvenir, let's say, from the Ayleid city of Abagarlas.” 

“It does not look like any Ayleid weapon I have ever seen,” said the moon priestess. 

He shrugged. "Well, it wasn't made by the Ayleids. It's a gift from their city's patron.” 

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “A gift?” 

“Maybe ‘prize’ is a better word for it,” he said, eyes fixed on the mace. “In Abagarlas, they have a tradition. A tournament, of sorts. Every few decades or so, shove about three hundred men into a demi-plane, then watch them fight to the death until there's only one left standing.” 

“That's _horrible_ ,” Anequina cried. “No prize could be worth participating in such a tournament! How could you do such a thing?" 

“I beg your pardon, Sharp-Tongue,” he said, grimly, “but I do not recall ever saying it was three hundred _volunteers_.” He tossed it back onto the bedroll. “Besides, the mace wasn't awarded to the survivor; it was awarded to his owner.” 

Anequina trilled quietly to herself, weighing her thoughts before speaking. “You are right,” she said. “I should not make assumptions without reason. How did you happen to come by it, friend Cadwell?” 

“Arkay only knows,” was all Cadwell would say, throwing his cloak over the bedroll to hide it all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I'm rolling with the idea that the Nedic Massacres were basically Ayleid Hunger Games. Mostly because it seems like such a Daedraphile Ayleid thing to do, if Morihaus's writings are anything to go by. ~~Ayleids: Rated M for They Did WHAT To The Children~~


	3. Playing in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parts of this chapter were lightly beta'd by [Eidolon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eidolon/), the best typo and unwanted word catcher I know. Remember how I called the last chapter a Long One? I spoke too soon, it seems!
> 
> This is also the point at which I'm 95% sure it's going to stay in Mature/Rated R territory. I mean, it _could_ go further, but I'm not sure anyone wants it to. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm the world's worst mind reader.)

The Subtle Blade was, to all appearances, a completely mundane hunting knife. The blade was shorter than the hilt, barely longer than four inches, with a single edge and a thick spine. The grip was a simple wrap of aged leather, frayed and worn from years of continuous use. It had no ornamentation to speak of, with a plain and purely utilitarian guard and pommel. It looked like something a traveler would buy for a few coins from a merchant on the road.

The five members of the kra’jun sat in a rough circle, watching intently as Nurarion slid the Blade down the edge of Khunzar-ri’s sword with a feather-light touch. Fine spirals of metal rose in its wake, as if he was carving a piece of wood instead of steel. After reaching the tip, he flipped the sword over and did the same on the other side. When he finished, he held the edge up to the light, examining it carefully, before handing it back to Khunzar-ri.

“I wouldn’t recommend testing it with your finger,” the elf warned, gently. “Trust me, even if you’ve done it a million times before, you _will_ cut yourself.”

“Give this one a minute,” said Khunzar-ri’s scribe as she rose from her resting place on a sack of saltrice. “She should have a scroll where the ink smeared everywhere.” The Alfiq stretched, digging her claws into the burlap as she let out a spine-cracking yawn, and she pawed through a pile of scrolls in front of her. “Ah, here it is! Ugh, it even has ink paw prints all over. Feel free to cut it to ribbons, Zar.”

With a swish of her tail, a scroll slowly levitated up from the pile next to the scribe and over to Khunzar-ri, curling itself up into a tidy cylinder on its way. He took it from the air with a nod in her direction, then pulled the edge of the sword across the scroll, cutting it diagonally in one smooth, uninterrupted slice.

“How can this be?” asked Anequina, her eyes wide with wonder. “The blade does not look sharp enough to do such things. If not for the demonstration, this one would not believe it could even cut twine. Even _with_ the demonstration, it seems utterly impossible.”

“The literal metal of the blade isn’t actually the Blade,” said Nurarion with a smile. “It’s more like a focus to bind the spirit of the Blade, except that makes it sound unwilling, and let me assure you, it is quite content with this arrangement.”

“So there is a spirit bound to your knife,” said Flinthild.

“Blade,” said Nurarion. “The Subtle Blade does not like to be called a knife.”

The Nord chuckled. “I pity the poor thing. It is not even long enough to be called a dagger.”

The elf visibly bristled at this remark. “I’ll have you know it _chose_ this focus. It’s _subtle_. It slips undetected into places even daggers cannot go.”

“Like the hearth,” she said, grinning.

“Can it cut through a dragon’s scales?” asked Cadwell, hastily, hoping to avoid another tedious iteration of size-doesn’t-matter.

“The Blade can cut through anything,” said Nurarion, brightly. “The spirit has an edge finer than anything the mortal world has to offer.” 

“That is quite the boast,” said Flinthild, “but the scales of a _dovah_ are stronger than the armor of men and elves.”

“They are indeed,” he replied. “Not more so than the armor made from the scales and bones of the fallen, though, are they?”

There was a sharp hiss of air, almost a whistle, as she drew breath through her teeth. “You would have never survived fighting a Nord worthy of wearing such armor.”

“I never said it was a fight,” said Nurarion with a smile. His many rings glinted in the light as he brushed a loose strand of hair behind his ear. “You do remember how Ahzidal traveled the world in the pursuit of his craft?”

At this she was silent, but there remained a look of stark disbelief in her eyes.

“I must confess, I don’t know the full details of where the scales and bones came from,” continued the elf. “What I do know is, he wanted to make weapons and armor out of them, but no one had the means to shape it. They shattered the tools of the best of Alinor’s smiths. It was rumored it might even be beyond the secrets of Artaeum. So word of mouth sent him looking for me.”

“A knife could not do this,” she said. “Only tools of _dovahjot_ can work such things.”

“Ah, yes. The teeth, right?” Nurarion shrugged. “I suppose you can take years grinding tooth against tooth until it’s crudely taken the shape you need, and then from there, you can roughly fashion the armor and weapons.” He smiled again, flashing a line of perfect teeth. “But you’ve seen Ahzidal’s work yourself, haven’t you? Did you never wonder how he achieved such clean lines and precise fitting? Does it really look like he just stabbed everything over and over again with a tooth as a chisel?”

“Ahzidal would never accept the help of an elf,” said Flinthild, eyelids heavy with disdain.

The smile remained, but his brows pinched just the tiniest amount. “He would if he believed it would kill more elves in the long run.”

She looked at his face in silence again for a few moments, her expression unreadable, then nodded. “That’s fair. There are few lines he would not cross to prevent another Saarthal.”

Cadwell looked between the two of them. “So the answer is yes, I take it?”

“It would seem so,” said Flinthild, crossing her arms. “If the Blade could cut to the precise demands of Ahzidal, then it can surely cut a living _dovah_ , if you were capable of getting close enough to it.”’

“That is the difficult part,” Nurarion conceded. “I don’t tend to rely on it as a weapon for that reason.”

“But it would work,” said Cadwell, “if you could get close enough.”

“If only I were a true Tongue,” she sighed. “There are Shouts to bring _dovah_ down to the ground, but they are beyond me.”

He turned to her. “Wait, you can Shout?”

She nodded. “Yes, I was a trained as an acolyte in Solstheim. I would have been a _sonaak_ if I had demonstrated enough talent, but I did not. Not everyone does.”

“Still, that’s more than most can say. How much can you do?”

“Not much,” said Flinthild, with a small shrug of her shoulders. “I have studied the words since I was a little girl, and yet, my voice has shown only the strength needed for a single Shout.”

“That’s fine,” said Cadwell. “What does the Shout do?”

She scratched the side of her neck. “It pushes.”

“It pushes?” Nurarion couldn’t help but grin at this. “My word. A mighty Shout in the language of the wind, and all it does is push things.”

Flinthild glared at him for a moment, her eyes like sparks on steel, then turned to face a nearby barrel. She let loose a thunderclap of three words that sent it flying through the air, crashing into a boulder hard enough to splinter on impact.

“Yes,” she said, turning back to him, the air still reverberating as bruised apples scattered across the ground before them. “All it does is _push things_.”

Nurarion stared at her, eyes wide, and Flinthild gave him the kind of smile a wolf gives a sheep.

“Demons do not do things by halves, it seems,” mused Khunzar-ri.

Cadwell propped his elbow up on one knee and rested his chin in his hand as he considered the pile of apples and wood fragments.

“What’s the largest that you can push with it?” he asked. “Does weight impact it at all?”

“I am not sure,” said Flinthild. “The _thu’um_ of some Tongues is strong enough to punch holes in stone walls or to shout a man to dust, but mine is not. That barrel was simple. A group of charging warriors is simple. But I can only stagger a mammoth. It is useless against a _dovah_.”

“No, far from useless,” said Cadwell, thoughtfully. “We just have to make sure we aren’t trying to use a spanner as a hammer.” He turned to Nurarion. “You said that the Blade could cut through anything. Does that include stone?”

“Of course,” said Nurarion. “It cuts through granite like a sword through butter. But I don’t see how that’s going to help us any.”

“It’s going to help more than you think,” replied Cadwell. “I’ve got an idea, but it’s going to require one of the rest of us to act as a decoy—”

Khunzar-ri and Anequina both spoke at once, their words blending together, then stopped and turned to each other, speaking in Ta’agra.

“You must not do this, Rass Le,” said Khunzar-ri. He sounded much more scholarly in Ta’agra than in Nedic. “You are far too important to serve in this role.”

“Don’t be a fool, Zar,” replied Anequina. “I will be in less danger than you. I am—” (Cadwell did not understand the phrase she used, he’d always thought it had something to do with music) “—I will be _fine_.” She sounded sharper, younger, more impulsive.

“You’re the one being a fool,” said Khunzar-ri. “That won’t help you here. You need to concentrate fully to—” (Again with that phrase. It reminded him of zither players adjusting their strings between songs) “—and there won’t be enough time for that with a demon breathing down your neck.”

“What I was going to say,” said Cadwell, clearing his throat, “is that the plan requires one of the rest of us to act as a decoy, and since it’s my plan, _I’m_ going to be the decoy.”

The two Khajiit started in response to this, as if they’d both forgotten he was talking in the first place.

“Friend Cadwell,” said Anequina, “there is no need for you to risk your life for this.”

“You could argue there’s never any need for anyone to,” replied Cadwell. “It’s always a personal choice. Since we’ve never fought together as a group before, we don’t know each other well enough to make those choices yet. Therefore, it would be unconscionably rude of me to expect someone else to take on the greatest risk, don’t you think so?”

Anequina’s ears tilted uncomfortably and the line of her mouth twitched.

It was a gambit that tended to work with elves. Each culture needed some slight adjusting for taste, but on the whole, the average elf would rather die than be _rude_. He had no idea how well it would work with Khajiit, but she was a moon priestess and the Ne Quin-al tribal leader, so perhaps—

“Very well,” she said with a sigh. “I would request to be allowed to help you in some way, at least.”

“Of course,” he’d said. “Every plan is a work in progress, and there’s always room for improvement. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.”

The hardest part had turned out to be getting the dragon’s attention, and then keeping it. Throwing rocks was unsuccessful; he couldn’t throw anything heavy enough to even be noticeable. Shooting a crossbow bolt got it to turn and search for him briefly if he managed to hit it in the eye, but he wasn’t able to keep that up with a moving target. Cadwell ended up having to get right between it and a cow it was menacing, driving off its lunch and disparaging the dragon’s mother.

The dragon seemed primarily insulted by the implication that it _had_ a mother. At least, that was the most he could gather as he ran for dear life while being shouted at in three languages, one of which was capable of splitting trees straight down the middle.

Cadwell had thought it would be hard to get it to follow him down into the Scar. It wasn’t. Every dodge and roll he had to do to get out of the way of incoming fire or the shockwave of a shout was the genuine article, and the dragon seemed too busy calling him a surprisingly vast number of insults and slurs in Ta’agra to look beyond that and notice his path was not a fruitless scramble of doomed panic. It followed him intently, far closer to the ground than he could have hoped for, with no ducking under overhangs necessary.

One overhang was essential, of course. That overhang had been carefully scored and carved away in advance. Nurarion was the best kind of perfectionist—it showed no signs of alteration from below. Apply enough force to its top surface, though, and it would snap off like a berry from a bush.

The dragon was calling him a clawless shaveskin at the exact moment Flinthild let loose. It hadn’t even finished by the time countless tons of stone came crashing down on it.

The stone didn’t kill it, of course, but it brought it down and kept it there. Blood poured down the side of its head. It was barely starting to come to its senses when Nurarion drew the Blade across its throat.

“You didn’t even need poor Khunzar-ri,” the Pahmar-raht said later, with a mock pout. He sat on the cliff, leaning back on his hands, his feet dangling off the edge created by the scored stone. “Nor even rescue by Anequina, for that matter.”

At the bottom of the Scar below them, they could see Nurarion trying, and failing, to avoid being taught a celebratory Nordic song and dance by a very insistent Flinthild with a jar of cider. Anequina watched over them from a nearby rock, visibly trying to hold back laughter.

“I don’t think this one was the brightest of the bunch,” said Cadwell, standing next to him. “That, and there are only so many overhangs in the Scar that you can use as a deadfall trap for a dragon. It’ll work a few times, sure, but we can’t depend on it forever.” He tapped the heel of his boot against the stone to test its sturdiness. If it could handle Khunzar-ri, it was probably fine, but he wasn’t going to risk it.

“It is a fine start, though,” replied Khunzar-ri, looking up at him. “You see? Khunzar-ri was right about you. He could not have made a better choice.”

Cadwell did not say a word. He just crossed his arms and reminded himself that in the middle of a desert, after running at full tilt from a dragon, _of course_ he was going to feel hot enough to melt—he should probably get out of the sun before it pickled him like a cabbage.

☙

This was a part of the Colored Rooms that Cadwell had never seen before. It was, in fact, even recognizable as a _room_ in the standard sense of the word, though in place of walls, it had thick incarnadine curtains stretching upwards into a night sky. They bristled in a subtle breeze over a floor of white marble.

“You have done well, both of you,” said Meridia, greeting them. “As promised, I will tell you of the last time a plan like yours, Cord-Eater, was carried out.”

She made a sweeping motion with one hand towards the center of the room. A sofa and a chair were arranged closely around an end table and tea table as they would be if they were crammed into the corner of a much smaller space. The end table had a marble vase with some leafy branches of an oak tree and a stalk of celery stuck in it. It looked a little like someone had taken interior decorating advice from a cat or a dog, or some other domestic animal with a strong familiarity with mortal furniture but absolutely no concept of what any of it is actually _for_.

Cadwell and Raksha politely followed the sweep of her arm and took their seats on the sofa. There was a large book set on the tea table. Cadwell had to discreetly lean on on armrest to read the spine: Postputrefaction Fungi of Valenwood, 7th Edition.

This was probably why he’d never seen an interior space in the Colored Rooms, he realized.

“Thank you,” said Raksha, as Honor leapt up and nestled in his lap. “This is a very cozy space you have here.” Cadwell nodded in agreement. Cozy: the tactful word for _oh god where do my elbows go_. “You had said before that it was a plan carried out when the Mundus was young.”

“It was very young, indeed,” said Meridia as she settled down into the chair. “What you have done, Cord-Eater, is to uncover the method by which madness was born from order.”

Cadwell raised an eyebrow—this sounded like vague rubbish, even by the standards of Daedric Princes—but Raksha’s eyes grew wide, wider, the widest Cadwell had ever seen them.

“The birth of Sheggorath?” he said, awestruck.

Meridia nodded. “The very same.”

Cadwell looked between the two of them, brow furrowed in confusion. “It’s normal enough for Meridia to talk of Daedric secrets,” he said, “but it’s not often that you know something I don’t.”

“It has been brought back to everyone’s attention by recent events involving the Shivering Isles,” said Meridia. “You are, as it were, not mad enough for it to be your business.”

“Beg pardon,” said Cadwell, slightly miffed, “I’ll have you know I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this madness.”

A lesser being would have sighed and rolled her eyes. On some ineffable level above the ken of mere mortals, she may have done so anyway. “I am sure you have heard, at least, of the return of Jyggalag.”

“Oh yes,” he said, brightly, “the Mazken of Coldharbour have been all over it for two centuries. Prince of Order, returns to invade the Shivering Isles for one day at the end of every era. This time he called off the invasion and actually stuck around.”

“His restoration is permanent,” said Meridia, “though much to everyone’s relief, he seems to be focusing his efforts on building and populating a new plane.”

“That is fortunate,” said Raksha. He absentmindedly stroked the back of Honor’s head, who made a sound somewhere between a purr and a chirrup. “If he were to seek vengeance on the remaining fifteen, it would be troublesome, to say the least.”

“His vengeance is merely postponed,” she replied, flatly, with an odd hollow tone to her voice. “Jyggalag has been nothing but rational, and it would not be logical to go on the offense against the major planes of Oblivion without the means to carry it through to the end.”

“You’ve lost me again, I’m afraid,” said Cadwell. “I gather something happened in the Shivering Isles last era that means Jyggalag’s back for good, and apparently Sheogorath had a birth of some sort, which I suppose is better than not having one at all, but I don’t entirely see how that’s—”

He paused suddenly, clouded eyes staring at nothing in particular as an idea careened across his brain like a sweetroll thrown overhand into the Void.

“But that can’t be right,” he said, incredulously. “Old Sheogorath’s still around.”

“The difference between Raksha’s method and the one used on Jyggalag,” said Meridia, patiently, “was the late edition of a single day of restoration every era, the Greymarch. Sheogorath, in his creativity, realized that if another mantled his godhead during the Greymarch, one strong enough to hold back Jyggalag, the cycle would be broken, and the Greymarch would be no more.”

“So that means Old Sheogorath doesn’t exist anymore,” said Cadwell, slowly. “There’s a New Sheogorath.”

“No,” she said, “Sheogorath remains Sheogorath. The mantling was a willing union with someone cast from the same mould, not a taking of his godhead by force. The mantled and mantling are one and the same.”

He rubbed the sides of his temples. “All right, I think I follow. Who’d Sheogorath find to mantle him, then?”

“A once-mortal champion of Cyrodiil.”

“Wait.” He looked at Raksha. “Is it like what you did, back then? With Akatosh?”

“In the sense that it was a mantling,” said the Khajiit. “But this one is not of dragon’s blood, and his nature is not so akin to Akatosh that he might forge a pact on his own. That is why the sacrifice of Varen Aquilarios was necessary to re-affirm the pact with Alessia.”

“Doesn’t that mean you could have remained permanently mantled?” He did his best to keep the worry out of his voice, his tone as purely curious as he could manage. “I don’t remember anyone mentioning that being a potential risk.”

He looked thoughtful, almost pensive, with a slight smile on his face. “Raksha mantling Akatosh was necessary, and certainly a kind of connection remains,” he said, gently petting the bantam guar in his lap. “However, it came at a great cost, and in many ways it felt like carrying a crying child on his back. This one would not want to do it a second time if he could avoid it, let alone find himself carrying the mantle to the end of time.”

“Not one mantling is the same as any other,” said Meridia. “Though none are unable, some are simply more attuned to the nature of a particular god than others. For a very small few, such a mantle fits them as easily as their own skin—they could not shed it if they tried. It does not happen often. This was not the first mantling of Sheogorath during the Greymarch. It was the first that was Right.”

Cadwell let out a long and heavy sigh, the kind of sigh that goes with having to discard four eras of contextual metaphysics in the span of five minutes. Some Daedra were not always Daedra. A mortal could merge with a Daedric Prince if they were compatible enough and it would be completely seamless. Oh, and you could remould a Prince with less trouble than it took to create titans and Xivkyn.

“So Raksha’s plan,” he said, resting his chin in his hands. “The plan to re-expose the weakness Vivec left in his vestige, widen the hole with the Memory of Vivec until it changes him. It’s actually less ambitious than it could be.”

“It’s realistic for what you both are capable of,” replied Meridia. “You may be the most powerful soul shriven, but you are still soul shriven. It took the concerted efforts of fifteen Daedric Princes to change Jyggalag into Sheogorath. You will have less control over the process, and the change you would bring about is likely to be less dramatic, but any change is still a change.”

“This one apologizes if he is being too brash,” said Raksha, “but if Your Radiance would participate more directly—”

“No.” Her response was curt and stern, but Cadwell could swear there was something else in it as well. Then again, he could be reading too much into the tone of a single word.

“Very well,” replied Raksha, nodding respectfully to her. “This one appreciates your advice, at least. It is a welcome guidance, as well as reassuring to know that Cadwell and Raksha can accomplish this without further aid.”

“I did not say you would not need further aid,” said Meridia. “I simply cannot be the one to offer it. Instead, I would strongly advise you to meet with Jyggalag and speak with him before proceeding with your plan.”

Both Raksha and Cadwell stared at her with wide eyes. Raksha’s ears angled back hard, though he did not move enough to disturb Honor. Cadwell’s elbow slid off his knee, and he caught himself just shy of falling seat over kettle into the tea table.

“Sorry, didn’t quite catch that,” said Cadwell, tapping the side of his head. “Must be the right ear again. Never been quite the same since that one time with the titan. It sounded like you said we should meet with _Jyggalag_ , of all people.”

Meridia’s face remained unmoved. “You did not mishear me, Cadwell.”

“ _Why_ would you recommend we meet with Jyggalag?” asked Raksha. “This one would expect him to be the second-to-last Prince we should ever go near with this plan, and he only avoids being dead last because _that_ place is reserved for Molag Bal.”

“Because,” she said, patiently, “the addition of the Greymarch was Molag Bal’s idea. A single day of sanity, so that he would be tortured by the knowledge of what he had been and would become again.”

There was a very, very long pause, so pregnant that it might have been experiencing contractions.

“Ah,” said Raksha.

“I see,” said Cadwell.

Meridia closed her eyes as she continued. “Your fear is not unwarranted; I cannot predict what his response will be. He may believe that no other should experience what he did, in which case, you will need to prevent him from interfering before you can succeed. He may wish for vengeance upon Molag Bal, who acted to ensure he was not only changed, but suffered from the change. He may feel something like gratitude towards Bal, whose sadism nevertheless created the opportunity for his permanent restoration.” She shook her head and opened her eyes again, looking off and to the side. “The future may be none of these things—Jyggalag was always dependably alien, not merely by the standards of mortals, but by the standards of Daedra, as well.”

“But you recommend that we talk to him anyway,” said Cadwell.

“Yes. I do.”

“Very well,” said Raksha, tenting his fingers on top of Honor’s back. “Khajiit will do as you ask, if he can rely on you to show us the way to Jyggalag’s new plane of Oblivion.”

She nodded at them with the dignity of a widowed consort, and gestured once with her hand. A portal of light opened in the unused space of the room. “This should bring you to a nearby plane. You should be able to find the rest of the way on your own. His new realm is, I gather, called the Umbilic Torus.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Your help has been most welcome.” With that, Raksha picked up Honor, rose from the sofa and began to walk towards the portal, Cadwell following closely behind as Honor squawked with annoyance.

“Cadwell,” said Meridia as she stood. “There is one last thing.”

He turned back to her, blinking curiously. “What’s that?”

“When you meet with Jyggalag,” she said. “I would like to ask that you also deliver a message to him from me.”

Something like relief wiped across Cadwell’s face—silly as it was, delivering a message from another Prince somehow felt safer than barging in uninvited for their own reasons. “Of course,” he said. “What do you need me to tell him for you?”

The light of her visage seemed to vibrate for a moment, blurring the edges and details in a haze, colors separating in a rare moment of chromatic aberration. “Please tell him that I regret my role in his perversion. I do not expect or request his trust. I only wish for him to know that I realize it was unnecessary and unwarranted. If I had known then what I know now, I would have chosen differently.”

This was an apology. She was asking him to deliver an apology. Did Daedric Princes apologize to each other? Was that even a thing?

“I’ll pass it on,” Cadwell said, raising an eyebrow. “I have to admit, though, I don’t understand myself why you were involved. I mean, you’re fond of Order, too, and even if your personal flavors are very different, there should be more compatibility between the two of you than with, say, Hircine.”

“At that time,” said Meridia, with something like hesitation, “I was new to Oblivion, and did not yet know who could be trusted. Molag Bal saw his opportunity, and used deception to convince me that he was a trustworthy ally. When Jyggalag was cursed, I still believed in his lies.”

“It’s hard to imagine,” he said, his expression softening without his realizing it. “But I suppose if I was in your place, new and not knowing anyone, I wouldn’t have done much better.”

The fingers of one of Raksha’s hands were curled before his face, and he was looking off to the side, lost in thought, as he cradled a scowling Honor in his other arm.

“Cord-Eater,” said Meridia, and he looked up at her. “It seems that you have an unspoken opinion on this.”

“Not an opinion as such, no,” said Raksha. “This one was simply trying to remember what he had once heard of an old Khajiiti myth, from before the Riddle’Thar.”

“Ah,” she said, flatly. “That one.”

He tilted his head. “You are familiar with it, then?”

“Something like it did occur, yes,” replied Meridia.

Cadwell lifted his chin, eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them. “All right, now we have a _second_ instance of you knowing some Daedric secret I don’t. I suppose I need to brush up on my gossip. Must be getting a bit rusty with age.”

Raksha did not look away from Meridia, instead giving her a single sharp nod, as if asking a question. She crossed her arms and slowly nodded back at him.

“There is a myth,” said the Khajiit, “that shortly after the creation of the world, Molagh attacked the Lunar Lattice, accompanied by Merrunz Dagon and Merid-Nunda.”

Cadwell gawked at Raksha, white eyes wide and staring, and then turned his bewildered gaze to Meridia. “You attacked the Lattice? Why?”

Her edges wobbled, their colors faintly red and blue. “Molag Bal insisted that something terrible would happen if the Lattice wasn’t destroyed. I was foolish enough to believe him.” She set her jaw and came back into sharp focus. “In the myth, he was fought to a standstill by Boethiah, and we were both defeated by the power of Azura. What the myth does not say is that it is thanks to his fight with Boethiah that I learned how much I had been deceived, though it took me a great deal of time in the Void before I was able to accept it as truth.”

He couldn’t help but stand there, dumbfounded. All of the Daedric Princes ganging up together against one of their own—that took some coordination, but he could see it happening under the right circumstances. He never would have guessed in a million years that Meridia and Molag Bal had ever associated with each other, especially to the point of fighting at each other’s side.

“Khajiit does have one question to ask of Your Brilliance,” said Raksha, “if you deem it permissible. He would not be so rude as to demand an answer.” He spoke slowly, precisely, as if weighing every word before allowing it out of his mouth. “The myth also speaks of a figure who is identified by title, but never by name. Are you—” He paused to consider his options, humming a single note in thought. “Are you the one who freed Merrunz from his torture?”

This question, somehow, shot through Meridia like a bolt, and in that one moment, she shook like a reflection on the surface of an agitated pond.

“This one apologizes,” said Raksha, quickly. “It was rude of him to pry—”

“You are not prying,” said Meridia, rigid as crystal. “It is in the myth. You asked for clarification. And yes, your suspicion is correct. I was.”

His ears shifted subtly, a downcast tilt accompanied by a lowering of his eyes and a slow nod. “This one offers his condolences, then.”

Cadwell wanted to ask about this third secret, this final thing he did not know, but something in the flavor of regret in the air held him back. There was something bitter to it, a sharp sting, beyond anything he’d ever heard Meridia say before.

It was unbearably relatable. And he knew, in her place, he would be quietly praying for the moment to pass so he could move on to anything else.

They entered the portal without saying another word.

☙

Another attempt at the deadfall strategy did not go so well. This one was a frost dragon, stolid and calculating, and it seemed impossible for Cadwell to goad it into the same kind of indulgent rage. Mist visibly flared from its nostrils as it turned and stared at him, sun glinting off its eyes like light through an icicle, but it did not shout or roar. If anything, when it did start to follow him, it seemed to do so solely out of a kind of malicious curiosity.

It initially wouldn’t even descend into the canyon. Instead, it ascended higher, gliding in a circle above the Scar, like a vulture circling a carcass. It took a great deal of ducking in and out of caves, doubling back and circling around to draw it down, and it kept a steady speed as it flew through—carefully paced, like the flying equivalent of a slow jog. This was not a chase, but a leisurely game of hide and seek.

Cadwell thought about ducking into a cave and just staying there, hiding for several hours until the dragon eventually got bored and left. If he was acting by himself, he would have done it already. But he had no way to call it off for everyone else, no way to signal to them that this one wasn’t going to work.

He was just going to have to hope his gut was wrong, this time.

When they approached the chosen overhang, the dragon began to pick up speed. Cadwell allowed himself a brief moment of hope—it was going to try to catch him before he could make it under. He threw himself into a sprint to close the distance. As the shadow of the overhang fell over him, he glanced back at the dragon.

The dragon was not flying under the overhang with him. It flew up beside it, rising almost vertically, and grasped the ledge with its hind legs.

 _Shit,_ was all he had time to think as the stone snapped off above him.

His sight went dark. He felt thrown off-balance, almost spinning, his face pressed into a hard darkness.

A second later, he hit the ground. Two seconds later, he realized he wasn’t dead. The darkness was warm and breathing heavily. It had a heartbeat. And fur.

“Apologies,” said Khunzar-ri, coughing. “This one was not quite as fast as he should have been.”

The Khajiit rolled slightly to the side, and Cadwell finally had enough light to see that he’d been tackled—back to the ground, his face against Khunzar-ri’s chest, arms wrapped around to protect him from the force of the fall.

“Seems like you were fast enough,” he said with a cough of his own, turning his head towards the light. All he could see was dust.

“Nurarion was worried when he saw the demon circling above,” replied Khunzar-ri. “He wanted to call it off, but there was no way to warn you.”

Cadwell started to laugh, but he inhaled a lungful of dust and began to cough again.

“Careful!” Khunzar-ri pulled one arm out from under Cadwell and lifted himself up to his knees, still cradling him in his other arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Cadwell tried to say. It came out more like a dry creak.

A deafening sound surrounded them, like an avalanche made of laughter. Khunzar-ri turned with a start—the dragon was standing on the rubble, looming over them, its great maw open in something resembling a condescending grin.

“Are you having a moment, little morsels?” asked the dragon with a purr. “If only every meal gave such a dramatic performance. Kaalgrontiid will be amused.”

A small bolt of fire smacked it in the back of one of its wings, followed quickly by another and another in a harmless but annoying barrage of pinprick-like flames. It snarled with irritation and turned back towards the source: Nurarion, both of his hands blazing with fire.

“Apologies for this, too, friend Cadwell,” said Khunzar-ri. Before he could respond, the Khajiit threw an arm under his knees, scooped him up, and had begun to run headlong down the canyon.

He was aware of the sound of aggravated growling and the crunch of stone breaking underneath massive claws. Yet his attention was minutely focused on how he was curled against Khunzar-ri’s chest, and the growling seemed faint next to the pounding of his heart.

It might have been better to die, he thought, as they were suddenly enveloped in light, and then darkness again.

When Cadwell came to, they were back at his tent in the camp. He was laying on top of his bedroll. Anequina was kneeling by his side, hands raised over him and glowing with magic, with Khunzar-ri seated on the ground next to her.

“Ah, you have returned to us,” said Anequina with a kind smile, the glow in her hands gently fading away. “How do you feel, friend Cadwell?”

“I’ve been better,” he said with a small groan, pulling himself upright. “Is Nurarion—?”

“His pride is wounded,” said Khunzar-ri, “but fortunately, that is not fatal in most cases.”

Cadwell raised an eyebrow, and looked at Anequina. “Did I miss something?”

“Flinthild saw fit to shout Nurarion through the lunar portal,” said Anequina. “To get him through faster, she insists.”

“Sounds like I missed the best part, then,” he said. One corner of his mouth started to curl up into a half-smile. He turned his gaze back to Khunzar-ri and the smile vanished. “I take it we didn’t snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

“Any battle everyone can walk away from is a victory of a sort,” said Khunzar-ri. “But no, the kra’jun did not manage to kill this dragon.”

“Well, there goes the deadfall trap,” said Cadwell, sighing. “They’ll all know about it now. We won’t be able to use it again.”

“Do not mourn for it, friend Cadwell,” said Anequina. “There will be other opportunities. The important thing is that we are all alive to retreat and construct our plans anew.” She patted him on the shoulder, and he flinched, sparking an apologetic look in her eyes. “You should rest. Even with magic, there are things that only a meal and a good night’s sleep can help with.”

She rose to her feet and went to the entrance of the tent, but did not leave. Instead, she stood there, arms crossed, watching Khunzar-ri as he lingered by Cadwell’s side.

With Anequina beside him, he had the same devil-may-care smile as ever, his golden eyes sparkling with their usual charm. As she rose and passed behind him, the smile melted from his face, and his brows furrowed with worry.

“That was much too close, five-claw,” he said, quietly, almost a whisper. “If Khunzar-ri had been even a moment slower, he would have lost you.”

“These things happen,” said Cadwell. He turned away and stared at an empty corner of the tent. “You honestly didn’t need to do that, but—thank you, I suppose.”

“This one most certainly did need to do it,” said Khunzar-ri, firmly. “Every member of the kra’jun is essential. _You_ are essential.”

“We need a better way to communicate,” he said, still staring at the corner. “It wouldn’t have gotten to this point if we’d been able to signal to each other that something was wrong.”

Khunzar-ri nodded, sagely. “Do you have any suggestions, friend?”

He rubbed his eyes with one hand. He could still feel the dust under his eyelids. “I’ll need some time to think about it. Not sure I’m in any state to come with anything decent right now.”

“There is no need to force it, brave walker,” said Khunzar-ri. “Rest well and be kind to yourself. If an idea comes to you while you rest, then the kra’jun will be blessed by your cleverness. If not, you will still recover, and there will be time to work together to find the solution to our problem, yes?”

Cadwell turned and looked at him. Khunzar-ri was smiling again, but the worry had not left his eyes.

He nodded, slowly.

“Take care, friend,” said Khunzar-ri, gently patting him on the back of the hand before rising and leaving the tent with Anequina.

Cadwell stared at his own hand for a minute before he realized he could still hear Khunzar-ri and Anequina talking. They had started arguing just outside his tent. Their voices were hushed and they spoke in Ta’agra, but they must have literally not even stepped away from the closed flap before beginning.

“You could have gotten yourself killed,” he heard Anequina hiss. “The Nord volunteered first, you should have—”

“The Nord is strong but she is not fast,” Khunzar-ri said, interrupting her sharply. “It had to be Zar. If she had gone, both she and the Nede would be dead.”

“You don’t know that,” said Anequina. “You didn’t let her try.”

“Zar did not let her risk her life because he knew he _could_ save him, with certainty.” He sighed heavily. “Why don’t you ever just say that you are worried? Why do you have to turn it into—”

“Because you never listen to me,” she said, with the bitterness of years. “I tell you that I’m worried and then you go ahead and do whatever you want to do anyway.”

“Zar _is_ listening,” said Khunzar-ri. “He is always listening. Listening is not obedience. He can listen to you and acknowledge how you feel, and still make his own decisions for himself.”

“They’re not just decisions for yourself,” she snapped. “Do you think they don’t affect me? If you died, could I really just go—”

Cadwell rolled onto his side, facing away from the entrance flap, trying to ignore their argument. They were only having it in Ta’agra because they didn’t think the rest of them understood any of it, and even then, he was sure they didn’t realize how loud they were being.

There was a lot that still came across from just the timbre of their voices. There were the sharp jabs and dodging feints of a heated argument, their words overlapping like the clashing of steel on the battlefield. Then there was a silence. After that, for a few minutes, only Khunzar-ri spoke. He had a low, propitiatory tone, like he was trying to approach a wounded animal.

“Please,” Cadwell heard him purr. “Let Zar make it up to you.”

He didn’t want to hear any of this.

Cadwell gritted his teeth and pushed himself up, first onto his knees, and then stumbling to his feet. He wobbled like a newborn fawn. Gods, he had to have been a right mess before Anequina healed him.

When he threw open the flap to leave his tent, they jerked away from each other—breaking out of an embrace, he realized.

“Friend Cadwell,” said Anequina, sheepishly wiping her face, “we thought you were asleep.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, dryly, and hobbled between them without another word, making his way to the campfire.

Flinthild and Nurarion were already there, and the elf waved him over, seemingly relieved to see him on his feet. Cadwell politely accepted the invitation, politely sat beside them, politely nodded and made listening noises as they chatted among themselves about this and that and who even cared. His mind kept slipping away, going anywhere but where he wanted it to be. It kept going back to Khunzar-ri’s arms around him, back to those worried eyes looking at him, back to the low purr of “Let Zar make it up to you” outside his tent.

“Are you saying you’re not upset that you couldn’t be a priest?” Nurarion asked Flinthild, eyes wide with both surprise and interest.

“I would have gladly been a _sonaak_ had I possessed the talent,” she replied, “but to obtain the power of a _sonaak_ is to trade away the things that laymen take for granted. A _sonaak_ is not to marry, nor take on lovers, and one is to have no personal possessions—all you have belongs to the Temple, and traditionally, all in the Temple belongs to your _dovah_.” She smiled as she took a swig of hard cider from a jug. “In Solstheim, the _sonaak_ have had the strength to cut ties to the _dov_ but have retained all the other traditions. The rest of Skyrim, their _sonaak_ remain stubbornly loyal to their _dovah_ regardless of what they do.”

“Ah, a religious schism,” said Nurarion, wistfully. “Those are always _fun_. Perhaps Solstheim will be the Artaeum of the Nords, one day.”

“Unless it somehow becomes an island,” said Flinthild, “that does not seem likely to me.”

At some point Flinthild handed Cadwell a jug of cider. Or perhaps it was Nurarion. Perhaps it just appeared in his hands, sourceless, the cider itself taking pity on him.

He drank like he was dying of thirst. Flinthild laughed about something and slapped him on the back. He jumped, spilling cider on himself, and shot her a withering look.

“Oh, I didn’t hit you that hard,” she said. “Did I?”

“You always hit hard,” said Nurarion, grinning. “You’re a Nord! A smack in the ribs is just a tickle to you.”

“Not even,” said Flinthild, laughing.

Cadwell sighed, downed the rest of his cider in one gulp, and stumbled back to his tent. He laid down on top of his bedroll and tried to sleep.

It was too quiet.

He wasn’t going back out there. There was nothing out there for him. False camaraderie based on an idea that had nothing to with his life. They knew nothing about what he was really like.

Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days, Weeks, Months, Years, Centuries. He couldn’t tell how much time was passing. He couldn’t see the sky. He couldn’t hear the desert. He heard breathing. He heard blood pumping in his ears.

He got up and left the tent.

Cadwell avoided the campfire this time, circled around the back and found a shaded spot within sight of Khunzar-ri’s tent, nestled between a pair of large rocks. He settled down with his back against one, and stared at the tent a while.

He couldn’t hear anything but the desert, which was a small blessing. He knew, from his time sitting with Flinthild and Nurarion, that Khunzar-ri and Anequina had gone into the tent hours earlier, and they had not yet emerged.

“They are a bit on-again, off-again, aren’t they?” Nurarion had mused earlier. “I’m not sure I miss the tempestuousness of young lovers.”

Flinthild just snorted in response. “When both lovers are a storm,” she had said, “it sinks the whole ship. If one is the Wind of Kyne herself, the other must be as flexible as the reed.” A pause to chug cider. “That’s why I love small women. Two strong Nords would be a hurricane that destroyed the world.”

“No, that’s still dangerous,” Nurarion had said, smirking. “The small can still be surprisingly strong. Haven’t you ever seen an ant carrying a stick several times its own size? And as for the idea that they are less intense—I’d say it’s the opposite. If anything, they’re more densely packed.”

“In that case,” Flinthild had said, “the world is doomed.” And she laughed.

He rested his arm on his knee, his other leg stretched out straight, and sighed as watched the back of Khunzar-ri’s tent.

“If you continue to stare like that,” someone said, “Anequina Sharp-Tongue will be the death of you.”

It felt like his stomach had launched itself into his mouth, but his only outward reaction was a slight twitch around his eyes. He kept his expression steady and turned his head just enough to see the source in his peripheral vision: Khunzar-ri's Alfiq scribe, seated on the rock behind him.

“She is a jealous one,” the Alfiq said, pausing to scratch an ear with her hind leg. “No amount of reassurance that this one is not interested in any men, even one such as Zar, has ever been enough to satisfy her.”

“This isn't like that,” he replied, warily.

“And this one is a mighty Senche-raht,” she said with a small snort. “You are fortunate that Anequina has not noticed, but it takes more to fool a storyteller. Every story must grow from the seed of truth.”

“I'm just an extra pair of hands he's hired on,” said Cadwell, doing his best to keep a level voice. “I'm not part of this wandering hero act. Once all this with the dragons is done with, I'll take my pay and go.”

“You may well do so,” said the Alfiq, “but you may not be rid of him so easily. Anequina left for many years, swearing she would never deal with Zar again. And yet, once he came to her seeking aid, she has found herself again at his side and in his tent.”

“If Sharp-Tongue can't say no to him,” he replied, bitterly, “that's hardly my problem.”

“Mm hm.” The Alfiq licked a paw and wiped her face with it. “Tell me, warrior friend, how many times before have you agreed to work with no payment up-front, only the promise of shared spoils and reward upon completion?"

The corners of his mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

“Everyone is always making exceptions for him,” she continued. “He has a touch of Sheggorath's power to him. Perhaps because he is so touched by Sheggorath himself.”

Cadwell turned and looked at her, eyebrows furrowed.

“Do not take what Khajiit says literally,” said the scribe. “But she has traveled with Zar long enough to know even he does not necessarily believe everything he says. He is tricking himself as much as he is tricking everyone else. Yet somehow, through some miracle of madness, he turns the trick into a real thing, and makes a hero out of himself and everyone around him.”

“Maybe he manages it with everyone else,” said Cadwell. “But I’m no hero, no matter what he says.”

An amused tilt of her head. “They all would say the same, no? Not one of them truly believes they are as heroic as Khunzar-ri tells them they are, but his unshaken faith in them gives them the strength to do things they did not think possible.” She squinted at him for a thoughtful moment. “Though it is true, this one would say, that you must have the hardest time of them all.”

He frowned and let his arm fall from his knee to the dirt. “You make it sound like you’re thinking of something specific.”

“You come from a different place than they do,” she said. “You bear the scars of it, and they do not see them. But this one does.”

Cadwell shot her a look. She couldn’t possibly know, and yet, she sounded certain.

“You do not need to worry. It will remain your personal business.” The Alfiq sat fully upright, front legs straight and steady, and in spite of her actual size, she seemed to loom over him from on top of the rock. “This one will not write of how frequently you wake at night and do not fall back asleep, peering out of your tent with a dagger in hand. She will not write of how you always sit with your back to a wall, a cliff, a boulder, a tree trunk. She will not write of how you leap from loud noises like a lizard drops its tail, nor of how often you shake and sweat in silence for an hour after.”

He glared at her, his ears burning from the raw exposure of her words. It was beyond naked; it was as if he was skinless.

“Unless you wish otherwise,” she said, solemnly, “none will ever need to know that you live in the shadow of Molagh.”

“What I wish,” he spat, before he even realized he was speaking, “is for you to _mind your own business._ ”

She curled her tail to the side in an indifferent arc. “As you desire, Cadwell the Clever.”

“Not ‘Cadwell the Clever’,” he said, trying to calm himself down. “Just Cadwell.”

“Sadly, that cannot be an option,” said the Alfiq. “The traditions of Khajiiti literature state that a foreigner of note cannot be given a traditional title. Were you a Khajiit, you would surely be a ‘dar’. But you cannot be, and so, you will be given an epithet. If this one does not give you one, others who have never met you will give you one instead.”

He stood up and dusted himself off. “Do whatever you want when you’re writing one for the history books, or whatever it is you do. Right now we’re just talking. There’s no need for any of it.”

“Oh, is that what you think?” She sounded genuinely surprised. “The idea that stories are only for others in the future, and not for the present moment—that is a strange one.”

He couldn’t help but let out a sharp laugh at this. “They’re good when everyone’s bored and you have time to kill, but that’s it. A story never put food in anyone’s mouth.”

“On the contrary,” said the Alfiq, “Without stories, there might not be food in anyone’s mouth. Everyone tells themselves stories all the time. Stories are how people make sense of the world. The hunter who tells himself that he is a skilled hunter will have more kills than the hunter who tells himself that his every success is from luck, if only because the first hunter will keep at it longer. The second may simply give up on hunting, and go on to find another story.”

“So you’re saying,” said Cadwell, “that you want to call me ‘Cadwell the Clever’, instead of just Cadwell, because you want me to think of myself as clever?”

“This one is saying that there is never ‘just Cadwell,’” replied the Alfiq. “Even if it is not in your words, you have already given yourself an epithet in your heart. You simply do not speak it aloud.”

“I’ve had too much cider for this nonsense,” he said, shaking his head, and made his way back to his tent.

He knew he wasn’t going to make much progress towards sleeping that night, so he began going through the collection, as he often did, looking it over for damage and wear. Many a sleepless night had been spent reinforcing the patches over the holes in a worn gambeson, cleaning the blade of his sword and oiling it to prevent rust, sharpening the edge on a war axe he’d never had reason to use.

“It is probably not too late to find your way into his arms,” he thought he heard someone say to him. “That is, if you wanted to be a meaningless conquest.”

No, not heard. It was like recalling what someone’s voice sounded like—a thought, clearly happening within his mind, that he would never mistake for a voice speaking to him in the present. Still, if this was a memory, he couldn’t remember where or when it had been said to him. Couldn’t remember who said it to him, or why. Yet the timbre and flavor of it was as familiar as the back of his hand.

“Then again, perhaps you would not even be worthy of being a notch on the bedpost,” he seemed to remember it continuing. It was a man’s voice, low and regal, well-controlled, with the smallest hint of a sour sharpness. “There are countless comical songs that are all the same: a young man gets far too drunk and leaps into bed with a very willing woman, only to find out with the dawn and the hangover that she’s old enough to be his grandmother. The joke is that she’s old. The joke is that no one in his right mind would touch such a creature. Wrinkled, frail, disgusting. A walking reminder of death.”

When did he hear this? Who said it? Why was he remembering it now?

“It’s not very funny,” he found himself saying to himself, quietly.

“The butt of the joke never finds the joke funny,” it seemed to have gone. “Yet the more you protest, the more hilarious you become.”

He looked down at his work. He was cleaning the mace from Abagarlas. It was old blood, black and caked on, and it seemed like no matter how much force he put into it, he could not actually get down past the blood to the metal below. It just continued to blacken the cleaning cloth, deeper and darker, seemingly without end.

A brief thought shot through him: maybe there was no metal under the blood. Maybe it was blood all the way through.

He set it down to one side, threw the blackened cloth over it, and moved on to a dagger.

☙

There are thousands of known planes of Oblivion, beyond the sixteen major planes ruled by Daedric Princes—Infernace, the home of Flame Atronachs, for example, or the Soul Cairn, ruled by the mysterious Ideal Masters. There might be thousands of unknown planes of the same or greater size. There might be millions or even billions of pocket realms. Every possible manifestation had a home, or at least someplace to return to from the Void.

It was still a surprise to arrive in the Umbilic Torus, after some awkward portals and asking for directions, and be greeted by nothing but the color grey.

The floor was a flat, matte grey. There were two identical walls of the same material, hundreds of yards apart, rising perfectly straight and perpendicular from the floor. The walls stretched side to side as far as the eye could see, eventually fading into a grey mist. They also stretched upward to converge at a single point, like an arch, though unlike an arch, the walls never curved.

Cadwell had to stop staring at it after a while.

The lack of any identifying detail or landmarks made it difficult to determine how far they had walked, once they picked a direction and went with it. The small advantage to it was that, the instant they saw a figure in the distance, it was impossible to miss him.

The figure they approached looked like a man wearing silver plate armor with long, almost crystalline spikes jutting forth from its pauldrons and helmet. His attention was focused on a large crystal laid on its side, apparently being used as a counter. Notes and artifacts were neatly arranged on its surface, aligned with such precision that it looked more like a museum display than a worktable.

He did not move like a man wearing plate armor. Every movement was reserved and precise. Not a fraction of an inch was wasted. His speed was never too fast or too slow. It was the movement of a Dwemer automaton without the wear of age, a factotum from the last production line of the Clockwork City.

It seemed possible that he would continue without acknowledging them unless they did something to grab his attention. Raksha looked at Jyggalag for a minute, then back to Cadwell, both hands wringing his staff as his ears twitched at a awkward angle. Even Honor circled around the crystal slowly, hesitant to make a sound. Then, seemingly without cause, Jyggalag stopped in the middle of his work, and raised his head.

“I know you,” he said, with a deep, reverberating voice. “You are the one Molag Bal fears.”

The Khajiit’s ears perked up with surprise. “You have heard of Raksha?”

Jyggalag’s head tilted at an inscrutable angle, and then he turned to face them.

“Ah,” he said, with a nod of acknowledgment. “Raksha Cord-Eater. You mantled Akatosh and destroyed Molag Bal’s form in the Second Era.” He paused for a moment, as unmoving as a stone. “I was not referring to you. I was referring to Cadwell of Coldharbour.”

Raksha’s ears angled back in confusion.

“Now, now,” said Cadwell, uneasily. “While I’ve definitely been giving him a rough time for four eras, what with the defense of the innocent and noble quests and what have you, I’m not sure you could really say that Molag Bal _fears_ me—”

“He does,” said Jyggalag. “No Daedra fears death. It is a temporary nuisance we all return from. It changes nothing. What you will do to him will be far worse, and it will change everything.”

“What, I’m going to do something to Molag Bal that’s worse than death?” Cadwell held back a laugh; it wasn’t exactly easy to read Jyggalag, but he sounded completely serious. “What could I ever do to a Daedric Prince?”

Jyggalag’s head turned towards Cadwell—a smooth mechanical motion without jerking or halting. In a way, that made it seem even less natural than if it had. “A long time ago, my realm was home to a great library. It housed logical predictions of the outcome of every action, every inaction, every branch of possibility within the Aurbis.” He took a step towards Cadwell, and then another. “Once, when the Mundus was young, Molag Bal visited the great library. He asked to know his future, though I suspect he did not believe in the library’s accuracy and merely thought I was a good target for manipulation. I showed him you.” The Prince of Logic slowly strode up to him, stopping at a polite distance to regard Cadwell with a tilt of his head. “He did not like what he saw.”

Cadwell realized that as Jyggalag had approached him, he’d begun shrinking back, putting as much distance between the two of them as he could manage without moving his feet. It put him off balance, small and wilting, like a lily transplanted to the desert.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Raksha’s tail whipping back and forth in a frenzy.

“This is excellent news,” the Khajiit said, his eyes round with excitement. “If he saw you in connection with the plan, and the plan is likely to succeed, Molag Bal would regard that as a fate worse than death, yes?”

“When the Mundus was young, men didn’t even exist yet,” said Cadwell. “That’s not ‘news’, that’s a _prophecy_.”

Raksha merely gave a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders in return. “It would not be the first time this one has found his actions correspond to a prophecy. Nor the second, or even third. It is practically routine, now.”

“But it’s not _you,_ this time, is it?” There was a sharp edge creeping into his voice, Cadwell realized, and he tried to rein it in. “I’m the one that Molag Bal saw. Before I existed, before anyone I knew existed.” He had to stop there. If he kept going, he wasn’t going to be able to keep it under control.

“You worry that your free will has been rendered meaningless,” said Jyggalag. “Do not be. Prophecies are self-repairing. Hermaeus Mora has always experimented with them to see how far they can be stretched before they are broken, and his results seem to suggest that the inevitable will work its way into reality, one way or another. The ball, once thrown up, will fall back down to earth.”

“That doesn’t help,” said Cadwell. “Even if I can choose to ignore it now and it’ll still find a way to happen without me, that means that everything I’ve—” He had to stop again, take a deep breath, shift his attention to Honor standing by his ankles. She cocked her head curiously at him.

Raksha’s tail stopped mid-swing, curling into a curious arc. His eyes scanned Cadwell from head to toe, assessing him carefully.

“Does anything of the prophecy remain?” asked Raksha. “Prophecies are often vague, and it may well be that your appearance in it is not as fixed and predetermined as it may seem.”

“The great library was destroyed by Sheogorath long ago,” replied Jyggalag. “Its contents continue to exist in Apocrypha, as the contents of all libraries past and future do. Still, I suspect one such as you would do better than to risk stepping foot into Mora’s domain.”

An involuntary shiver ran down the Khajiit’s tail, apparently without notice. “Yes. That’s probably a wise assessment.”

The Prince of Logic nodded to him, and walked away from Cadwell, seamlessly returning to his workstation without another word.

“You seem to be working on quite the project,” said Raksha. “Might this one humbly ask what it is?”

“This is Sotha Sil,” replied Jyggalag, matter-of-factly.

The Khajiit stared at him. “Sotha Sil is dead.”

“Yes, he is,” said the Prince.

Raksha continued to stare at him, waiting for elaboration. Jyggalag worked without acknowledging his stare; it was impossible to say if he was oblivious or indifferent.

“I think what my friend means,” said Cadwell, uneasily, “is that he’s not sure how Sotha Sil can be dead, and also be the project you’re working on.”

“Sotha Sil was, ultimately, a mortal,” replied Jyggalag. “A Daedra when killed is sent to the Void, but the Vestige remains, and once given the chance, the body will eventually reform.” He slid a few objects around on the crystal, rearranging them in a slightly different order with the same level of precision. “Though this is automatic for Daedra, a mortal being can be remade to have such a cycle of death and reformation, as well. Both of you owe your continued existence to this.”

“So you are hoping to resurrect Sotha Sil,” said Raksha.

“The physical form is the simplest part,” he said. “It is only matter, which can be arranged and rearranged indefinitely until it is suitable. The difficult part is the animus. The original soul of Sotha Sil cannot be retrieved through standard means. The Compact ensures it.”

With a smooth, sweeping motion of his hand in an arc above his head, a dome of stars appeared above them, foreign constellations entirely unlike the stars in the sky above Nirn. Raksha squinted at them, his expression somewhere between lethologica and concern.

“Most of the Mnemonic Planisphere survived his murder through hibernation, suffering only minor degradation, most of which was self-repaired through error detection carried out automatically on the completion and activation of the Mechanical Heart. As it currently stands, a Vestige with the memories of Sotha Sil can be created with 85.15% accuracy from the remnants of the Planisphere.”

“That sounds pretty good,” said Cadwell, not entirely sure what most of what he’d just been told even _was_.

“No, it is not enough,” said Jyggalag. “I will accept no less than 0.3% deviation. It will take some time to recover this remaining data, particularly the memories which were never stored in the Planisphere.”

“Why are you trying to bring back Sotha Sil?” Raksha asked. “Why Sotha Sil specifically?”

“An apostle once said, ‘only the Grey Prince of Order knew his nature, and he went mad in the knowing.’ This is technically true.” Jyggalag raised his head, looking at the stars of Sotha Sil’s memories as he spoke. “During the first Greymarch in the time of the Tribunal, he visited the Shivering Isles to observe the event. I recognized him for what he was, and then, at the conclusion of the Greymarch, I became Sheogorath again.”

“That is not quite the way this one had always interpreted that statement,” said Raksha.

“It was an accurate observation. The Apostle’s mistake was in assuming correlation equals causation,” he said. “A common enough fallacy.”

Raksha shook his head. “This one still cannot understand it. You are a Daedra. Sotha Sil was always in the way of the plans of the Daedra. He would not serve a Daedric Prince.”

“I am not seeking a servant or a champion,” said Jyggalag. “Servants and champions come and go with time. What I want is for there to be two beings who operate from logic, from deduction and induction, who do not live based on chaos and raw emotion alone. Even among Daedric Princes, Hermaeus Mora and Azura are still too mercurial, prone to their whims and predilections.” His face was not visible through the helmet, which possessed a false face like the ones on Dwemer centurions. Even so, the reflections of the constellations on the false face as they turned seemed to give it a subtle change in expression as he spoke. “Sotha Sil may go his own way, and he will have the right to. I will still know that, in Oblivion, there is one other who is the same, and it will be enough.”

“Even so,” said Raksha, as Honor settled down on the ground next to him, yawning and blinking her eyes. “There is one thing that this one has learned with time and practice. When it comes to the resurrection of the dead, it is all for nothing if the will of the dead is not also taken into consideration.”

Jyggalag nodded slowly, though he continued to keep his face raised to the stars. “The mortal life of the Chimer named Sotha Sil was always destined to have a birth, a life, and a death. That is the nature of the Mundus. The eternal concept of Seht has no beginning and no end. It has always been and always will be. That is the nature of the Aurbis. Where the two overlap, it turns like a gear, so that Ayem and Zyr appear as one and the same. That is the nature of the Wheel.” He turned his head to face Raksha. “It is only logical. He knew that he would be destroyed, and he knew that he would be remade.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Cadwell thought he saw movement in the wall. Not in front of the wall, not on the wall—inside the wall. He turned his head, almost out of instinct, and realized this, too, was inaccurate. The wall _itself_ was moving, writhing, like a flannel blanket thrown over a rabid dog.

“Raksha,” he said, cautiously backing away from the wall without taking his eyes off it. Raksha did not seem to hear him, and continued nodding intently and making thoughtful gestures at the impassive, statue-like figure of Jyggalag as all that remained of Sotha Sil turned above them.

He realized he couldn’t hear what either of them were saying. Everything was muffled, unclear, like he was underwater and they were above the surface. Before he could consider this for much longer, the writhing suddenly shot forward—a hand burst through like a whale breaching the water, wall dripping sideways back onto itself, a putrefying black mould spreading out across the flat grey plane from where the hand emerged.

The hand was holding a cane.

“Raksha, _friend_ ,” Cadwell said, almost shouting with urgency. “We need to leave _now_.” He turned and grabbed Raksha by the arm.

The arm came off. 

It was nothing so kind as “and it turned out to be the arm of a giant rag doll”. He could see the round head of the humerus emerging from torn flesh. He could see the ends of arteries and veins hanging dry and loose. The rest of Raksha fell to the ground in a pile before him, pupils blasted wide with the unseeing stare of the dead and empty.

“Oh, now look what you’ve done,” said a lilting voice behind him. “You broke him! I liked that one, you know. Cats are always fun.”

Cadwell took a deep breath. _This isn’t real,_ he told himself. _It’s like the Colored—_

“‘—Rooms of Meridia, except you can’t trust anything Sheogorath shows you,’” finished the voice behind him. “Honestly, how rude can you be? I’m _right here,_ you know.”

He turned and looked at the Prince of Madness. “A Gentleman with a Cane” was probably the safest way to describe him. He stood with both hands perched on the rounded grip of his cane—an eyeball set like a decorative gemstone. Both the eyes in his head and the eye in the cane met Cadwell’s stare with a wild, enthusiastic curiosity.

“It’s the funniest thing,” said Sheogorath, grinning widely enough to bare teeth. “Here I was on my way to tear Jyggalag to pieces again, and I run into you! The thorn in Molag’s side! You know how many times I’ve had to tell him we’ve never _actually_ met? I’m pretty sure it’s i.”

He should say something strange to deflect the situation. He should say something clever to regain control over it. He should at least say something utterly ridiculous to distract himself from his own terror.

He found he couldn’t say anything at all.

“Cat got your tongue?” asked Sheogorath. “That’s pretty talented for a corpse. Good job, cat!”

Cadwell shook his head, balling his free hand into an empty fist and focusing on the ground beneath his feet. “He’s not dead. You wouldn’t be able to kill him without a fight. You’re just making me see things.”

“Ooh, so close,” said the Prince, pinching his fingers together. “You almost got it! You’re right about Cord-Eater not being dead. It’s so much more fun in the long run if he’s alive. You’re wrong about the Making You See Things, though. This is all very, very real.” He gestured magnanimously with one hand towards Cadwell. “Go on, why don’t you have a look at that arm you’re holding if you don’t believe me?”

Cadwell glanced down at his hand. Raksha’s severed arm was gone.

He was holding the Mace of Molag Bal.

Sheogorath burst out laughing as Cadwell dropped the Mace with a violent start, almost as if it had burned his hand.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, beaming as he wiped a tear from one eye. “Well, not _sorry_ at all, actually, but you know—you walked right into that one and it was _glorious_. I’m so glad I went with that instead of the live snake this time. You’re like a cat with a cucumber!”

“That’s not who I am anymore,” said Cadwell, pointing a shaking finger at the mace. “I left that behind me a long time ago. It’s changed hands a dozen times since then.”

“If only the past worked that way,” said Sheogorath, with the kind of smile a nanny gives a child who still believes nixads sneak in at night to buy the tooth under their pillow for a single shiny septim. “Once a champion, always a champion, I’m afraid. Sorry! I don’t make the rules. At least, not that one.”

“You’re also a known liar,” he said, in a low voice.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” replied the Prince. His eyes and grin widened. “What do you say we take a little trip through your past?”

“No, thank you,” said Cadwell, firmly.

“But those are always so _therapeutic_ ,” said Sheogorath with a pout. “Come on, it’ll be absolutely horrendous and miserable, but you’ll come out of it more resilient and minty fresh! After all, Uncle Sheogorath definitely cares about your personal growth and well-being for absolutely no reason whatsoever and—” Here the Prince broke down into uncontrollable snickering. “Oh, I almost made it through that one with a straight face!”

The flat grey walls and floor of the Umbilic Torus were long gone now. Cadwell’s boots sank into vines slick with mud. No: not vines, and not mud. He shut his eyes and refused to open them. He felt Sheogorath clap his arm around his shoulders.

“The Gut Gardens of Sercen!” he cried with a hearty shake. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I got to poke at someone who actually saw them with his own eyes?” A pause. “Oh, now you’re cheating. You know that’s not allowed!”

His attempts to port away felt slippery, drunken. He felt them fall shut immediately on opening, like the eyelids of a man who hadn’t slept in years.

“You should probably just go ahead and kill me,” said Cadwell, crossing his arms. “I’m not going to play your games.”

“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you?” Sheogorath had a genuine edge to his voice that Cadwell hadn’t noticed before. “Well, I’m not going to play your kinky little game either. You think I don’t know that’ll just send you back home to Coldharbour? I might be mad, but I’m not a fool.”

Cadwell felt hot breath in his face. It was thick as a swamp fog, and smelled just as foul. He could hear a low growling in the back of something’s throat, and the grinding of large teeth.

“Here’s a little secret,” said Sheogorath, barely an inch from his ear. “I’m a different Mad God for everyone I meet. No one gets the same Sheogorath as anyone else. Not even if we’re all in the same room. _Especially_ not if we’re in the same room. Some people get a dotty old man who’s all wacky high jinks and jokes about cheese. Others get a gentleman poet with glass over his eyes. Cord-Eater gets a handsome little Alfiq who reminds him too much of his father. But you? You’re special.”

The growling grew louder. The breath felt like it completely enveloped his face.

“You get the Sheogorath _who invented Music_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Lore actually hit me in the face with something I'd never noticed when I was double checking the text of _The Adversarial Spirits_ by Amun-dro, the Silent Priest. I'd read it a million times before, and yet, this was the first time I caught the line where “the wife of Molagh freed Merrunz and used his destructive nature as a weapon against the Lattice.” I spent a few minutes just going “the what of WHO,” because that throws the whole “[Merid-Nunda] is the consort of demons” bit into a completely different light. I mean, I will roll with it, it _works_ for what I'm going for thematically, but algkjalkjg ESO omfg don't just hide things like that in a random lore book several expansions down the line.
> 
> Eidolon would murder me (and no jury would convict them) if I didn't explain that “You know how many times I’ve had to tell him we’ve never _actually_ met? I’m pretty sure it’s i” is [a big dumb maths joke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_unit) and not a typo. Because I do horrible things like that.


	4. The First Days of Spring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canonically, everything in ESO takes place in the same year, 2E 582. Absolutely everything. That stretches my suspension of disbelief a bit, especially since I'm handwaving away fast travel. Instead, I have a headcanon timeline that gives about a year to each of the main chapters: the Main Quest/Planemeld is 2E 582, Morrowind and Clockwork City are 583, Summerset and Wrothgar are 584, Elsweyr and Dragonhold are 585, and all the Dark Heart of Skyrim content is 586.
> 
> Prior Warning: this chapter contains some references to sexual violence, because fridge logic and Molag Bal, and elements which can be interpreted as dissociative in nature.

Raksha had never known how hard a bantam guar could bite before he met Cadwell. Granted, he had mainly witnessed incidents rather than experiencing them—Honor had the strangest tendency to start gnawing on any Bosmer in a five mile radius, no rational explanation available—but in a thousand years, he’d had more than his fair share of bitten fingers and chomped tails. It came with the territory. Spend time with Cadwell, get bitten by his trusty steed. It was never anything serious.

He still yowled in pain at the hardest tail chomp she had ever done.

“ _Cadwell,_ ” he said, after he’d wrenched his tail out from Honor’s jaws, petting the sore spot gingerly between his hands.

There was no response from Cadwell. Raksha paused, taking a quick glance around the empty grey space of the Umbilic Torus. There was no response from Cadwell because Cadwell was nowhere to be seen.

Raksha turned back to Jyggalag, whose gaze remained lifted to the constellations of the Mnemonic Planisphere. “Your Eminence—”

“I have no need for hagiographic titles,” said the Prince, unmoving. “Address me as Jyggalag. If you respect me, it will be apparent from your actions.”

“Jyggalag,” the Khajiit said, beginning again. “Where is Cadwell?”

His face lowered from the dome and he glanced around in confusion. It was the first motion he made that was imperfect, unmeasured, and it only added to the sense of unease hanging in the air around them.

Something was very, very wrong.

With a pinch of his fingers, the stars of the Mnemonic Planisphere vanished. Jyggalag swept an arm into the air, and the floor parted, severing in a straight line from wall to wall. Raksha stepped back from the edge, Honor moving with him, as these hand motions seemed to cause the floor to fall away and the walls to move around them.

He watched as the world itself unraveled, the entirety of the Umbilic Torus unfurling into a single spiral strip of grey before them and the Void. All of it was visible in a single glance.

“Cadwell of Coldharbour is no longer here,” said Jyggalag, staring down at the entirety of his realm. His voice contained a hint of something like concern.

“How can this be?” asked Raksha. “There’s literally nowhere he could have gone.”

Jyggalag whirled back to his crystal workstation. He made another gesture, and it began to fold in on itself along the facets of the crystal, tools and workstation alike bending and wrapping onto itself over and over again. Within a few seconds, the huge crystal had become something surprisingly small—a thumb-sized shard of mica that Jyggalag picked up from the floor and slid unseen into a divot in his wrist.

“This plane has the form you have seen,” said Jyggalag, with an authoritative exactness, “because I have needed it to be easily stored and restored when Sheogorath inevitably invades.”

Raksha started, a bolt of shock shooting down his tail. “Sheggorath invades? Why would he do that? That makes no sense. You’re the reason he exists in the first place.”

“You are assuming,” replied the Prince, “that the Lord of Madness has rational motives based in logic and sense. I can assure you that nothing could be farther from the truth. He is a mystery even to me.” Another sweep of his arms, and the Torus began to twist back upon itself, slowly re-forming the two walls and floor that had originally greeted their arrival.

“He still must do it for a reason,” insisted Raksha, “even if the reason is complete nonsense.”

“Perhaps he does,” said Jyggalag. “Though in the end, it is ultimately pointless. We are Daedra. We do not die permanently. Sometimes he succeeds in killing me. Sometimes I kill him in self-defense. The only thing that comes of it is a long reformation in the Void. It eats time. It accomplishes nothing of permanent value. It does not help him in any way that I can comprehend.” A hiss of air escaped him, like the pressure release of excess steam in a Clockwork automaton.

Raksha’s ears twitched, askew with dismay. “Khajiit must admit, that does sound like the Skooma Cat. His actions are unknowable and incomprehensible by mortal standards. Perhaps this one should not be so surprised that they are equally incomprehensible by immortal standards, as well.”

Jyggalag did not initially respond to his remark. Instead, he turned, looking down the corridor as it faded grey in the distance.

“I accept the ultimate responsibility for this,” the Prince said. “You, Raksha Cord-Eater, and Cadwell of Coldharbour—the two of you came to seek an audience with me, to learn what I alone know. You were not aware of the risks inherent to doing so, but I was. It would have been trivial to mention them to you, but I was distracted by my own personal interests. By the calculus of risk, I have clearly been negligent.”

Raksha regarded the Prince of Logic for a moment, quietly looking him up and down as Honor circled his feet.

“You are very much like Sotha Sil,” he said, finally.

“You do not intend that as a compliment,” said Jyggalag, “but it is an accurate statement.”

☙

It hadn't felt like a long amount of time passed between the singing of Sharp-Tongue's blade as it came down upon him and when he next opened his eyes. It was very much like—he was riding in a wagon en route to somewhere, he took a nap to sleep off the mother of all hangovers, and then woke from a dreamless sleep when the wagon arrived at its destination.

It was unlike this, of course, in that there was no wagon, beheading was a bit worse than a hangover, and the destination was Coldharbour. Some small details to keep in mind.

It was a place of Every Man For Himself, but it was also a place where everyone _knew_ it was Every Man For Himself. Everyone fully accepted that to survive and thrive, your boot needed to be grinding into someone's throat. If you held back, it would just be your throat underfoot before long.

Early on, he spent—weeks? months? years?— _some time_ in a lovely partnership with a rogue Dremora. She was building a collection, of sorts, of the various organs of her fellow Dremora—best harvested alive, she told him, still throbbing with the Animus when transplanted to the jar. Yet somehow her own kind were reluctant to aid her in her hobby, and had driven her into exile.

“Fancy that,” he'd told her when they first met, listening to her complain about her troubles from the net suspended above his camp. He'd had his knife pressed to her throat but had to lower it after she made him laugh too hard to keep it steady. “Proud warriors, the Dremora, but not one spine among them.”

“But they have some _lovely_ spines,” she'd insisted with a shiver.

He could ally in a moment with someone whose goals aligned with his, even if his goal of the moment was as simple as “I am bored, and you are anything but boring”. They both knew it would only last for as long as that mutual gain outweighed any other. No pretenses. No posturing. No having to act shocked when events took their natural course and she tried to cut his lungs out.

He had never felt more at home. And yet.

“‘And yet’?” Sheogorath clicked his tongue, shaking his head in disappointment. “Honestly, youth these days. So entitled! ‘I don’t want to murder and be murdered in a continuous cycle of misery and torture for all eternity! I want to have a _meaningful life_ and be able to _trust people_.’” He stepped over the corpse of the rogue Dremora and stood dead center in the puddle of her blood. “Well, I’m very sorry, but you can’t always have what you want. There are starving children in Morrowind who only get to die once. Can you imagine?”

Cadwell threw aside the dagger in his hands. “I really did like her,” he said, as he tried to wipe the blood off on his trousers.

“Maybe you should have let her have your lungs, then,” replied Sheogorath. “You’ll just respawn, anyway, so what’s the harm of it? You know how much she loves a good pair of lungs.”

“I wasn’t too keen on dying back then,” said Cadwell. “And I know her too well. It probably wouldn’t have stopped at the lungs.”

“Some people are just like that, aren’t they?” The Madgod pried the tip of his cane under her corpse’s chin and angled it up for a better view. “They just take, and take, and take. And then eventually they’ve got enough bits to make another you! That’s one way to become twins, you know.”

Cadwell sighed. “That’s not the part she’s still angry about, anyway.” He circled around Sheogorath, coming up beside the Dremora’s corpse, and squatted down next to her.

“I know you’re just some vision and not the real thing,” he said to the corpse, “because the real woman would’ve tried to kill me five times over by now. But if you _were_ her, I’d want you to know that I’m sorry. I know I went too far. I shouldn’t have thrown your whole collection into the Void while you were dead.”

The corpse stared at him while Sheogorath laughed.

“You’re a bit of an arse when you’re angry,” said the Lord of Madness. “I like that, up to a point.”

The ground around them shifted, and they were in another place, another time, though still surrounded by the cold and jagged spikes of the landscape of Coldharbour. They stood on the shore of a lake of azure plasm. A young soul shriven woman ran along the banks, screaming in terror, chased by a large group of Dremora Churls, boisterously laughing and finger whistling in their pursuit.

“Oh, speak of the devil and he’s at your elbow,” said Sheogorath, “arguing with you about the whole King of Rape thing again.” He turned to Cadwell. “Do you mind if I change the aesthetics a tad? Never really been a fan of this one of Molag’s hobbies, to be honest.”

Without actually waiting for a response from Cadwell, he lifted a hand off his cane and snapped his fingers. The soul shriven and Churls were gone: in their place were loudly quacking ducks.

“It’s still essentially the same thing,” said Sheogorath, as he watched the female duck plough into the lake with a dozen males honking as they followed, “but it’s so much more creative, don’t you think?”

“This isn’t funny,” said Cadwell, crossing his arms.

“Oh no, absolutely not, this is the most serious of serious memories, involving a special kind of evil above and beyond all other kinds of evil, and so on and so forth. I know how the story goes.” He gestured toward the lake with a generous sweep of his hand. “Now, unless I’m mistaken, this is the part where you kill all the ducks.”

Cadwell stared at him, bewildered.

“Don’t tell me you’d save a soul shriven but not a duck,” said Sheogorath, almost scolding him. “How cold can you be?”

Without saying anything, he drew his sword and charged into the lake after them.

☙

Jyggalag had summoned another crystal and unfolded it until it was the right size for Raksha to sit down and ponder their situation. Honor had settled at his feet again, though her head darted this way and that, searching without rest. The Prince remained standing, bringing up glowing diagrams and texts with a brush of his hand through the air and scanning through them with precise yet uncanny speed.

“It would seem,” said Raksha, his chin in one hand, “that there is nothing in the Torus but the Torus. You have been keeping everything of importance in your morphotype.”

“You are nearly right,” replied Jyggalag. “Near everything of importance is kept as information stored in my Vestige. From there, it influences my morphotype.”

The Khajiit blinked at him, head raising from his hand briefly. “You are changing yourself, then, simply to keep these things preserved?”

He dismissed one wave of hovering information and brought up another. “I am the only thing that I can be certain that Sheogorath cannot destroy. If the situation was different, the library would surely be rebuilt in some capacity, and Dyus could return to his previous duties.”

“Who is Dyus?” asked Raksha.

“Dyus was my chamberlain, and the keeper of the great library,” said Jyggalag. “He is the only remnant of the old Order that Sheogorath has not destroyed. Instead of killing him, he has been kept imprisoned in its ruins.” His motions paused for a moment. “My work would be more efficient if Dyus were present here with me. However, any attempt to retrieve him carries a strong possibility of marking him for death at Sheogorath’s hands.”

Raksha watched as Jyggalag dismissed the current set of information with a single motion of his hand, but continued to face in the same direction, as if he was looking at a new set of information that the Khajiit could not see.

“As much as it may seem counterproductive,” said the Prince, “the least harm will come to him if he remains a prisoner until I have the means to guarantee his safety.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, ears twitching and seemingly unable to settle on any position for long. “Perhaps Raksha is being rude, but he suspects you are telling him this as a parallel to the current situation.”

Jyggalag did not change his actions in any discernible way, continuing the motions of dismissing and summoning without anything visible happening in the air before him.

“You are not being rude,” he finally said.

Raksha’s tail, much like his ears, did not seem capable of staying still. It jerked about randomly in spasms, the fur standing upright and settling down in waves.

“This one can handle Sheggorath, himself,” he said, resting his head in both hands now. “Raksha does not enjoy it, but he can handle it. He has done it many times before and survived. He does not like having to simply wait for something to happen. Is it certain that we cannot stage a rescue?”

“The contexts in which you met him were less direct than this,” replied Jyggalag. “It is not often that anyone can truly rescue another from Sheogorath. He has presented you with choices that amuse him, but they are choices of his creation, and the means to force another outcome has never been in your hands. The most common way in which others underestimate him is to forget that. Always to their detriment.”

“There was also the time this one distracted him with a ball of yarn,” he said.

Jyggalag shook his head. “He was not as distracted by that as you may believe.”

Raksha lifted his head again, looking Jyggalag up and down. “You speak of it as if you remember. Do you?”

A low susurrus seemed to emit from his joints. “I remember it, and you, vaguely, as one might remember a dream.”

His arms lowered, and he stepped back from his unseen studies, standing beside the crystal that Raksha was sitting on. Honor’s face snapped towards him, eyeing him without retreating. With a flick of a finger, the Prince had cast another crystal to the ground, and it unfolded until it was large enough for him to lower himself down and sit.

“It never felt as if they were my own actions,” continued Jyggalag. “I became him, certainly. I understand it as a rational fact. But on some essential level, he was too different.” He curled his arms forward along the crystal as he sat, like an armored variation on a heron’s hunting canopy. “I could not think of myself as him; he could not think of himself as me. We were unable to exist simultaneously as long as the curse of the Greymarch remained in place, but we were also never truly the same being.”

“That sounds—” The Khajiit paused, almost chewing on his words. “Difficult,” he finally settled on.

“It was.” He turned his head towards Raksha, tilted slightly with thought. “There is something that happens in the Mundus sometimes, when the instructions for the arrangement of matter are altered in unexpected ways. Twins will be born without fully dividing. A snake with two heads. It’s not an unreasonable comparison.”

“This one has experienced something not unlike it,” said the Khajiit, gesturing with one hand. “It is hard to explain in Ta’agra, but harder still to explain in Cyrodilic.”

“All languages of the Mundus are the same to me,” replied Jyggalag. “Use whatever is most comfortable for you.”

“Very well, then,” said Raksha, and he began to tell the Prince of Logic about Moonlit Cove, in Pellitine.

☙

In 2E 585, Raksha Cord-Eater went to Moonlit Cove five times.

The first time, he had been hired to plant waning lilies in memory of the dead, at the request of a clan mother. She could not go herself, of course, because the former shrine had become a smuggling den in the wake of the Knahaten Flu.

It was a simple task. After dealing with the forces of Coldharbour, mere mortals like the Ruddy Fangs were almost a joke, and he could feel the appreciation of the spirits that lingered in the area. There was something else, a strange familiarity he could not sink a claw into, but he chalked it up to sentimentality and let it be.

Another time, he was hired to draw blood from the corpses of overdosed skooma addicts for an alchemist trying to create a new treatment. While he was there, a pilgrim to the shrines somehow roped him into a ritual for purifying the shrine waters of runoff from the skooma stills. The ritual involved drinking the waters. An ordinary Khajiit might not have survived without permanent damage, and even he was queasy for weeks afterward.

The third time he went to Moonlit Cove, it was with Za’ji for the new Dragonguard.

When Raksha was introduced to Za’ji, his first impression was not kind. _This Dagi-raht is an overgrown ja’khajiit,_ he had thought, and hoped Sai Sahan would not insist that he babysit him for long. Without the balance of Caska’s sarcasm, Za’ji might have been been intolerable. But then it was necessary for them to go to Black Heights, to Khenarthi’s Breath Temple. The instant she saw him, Clan Mother Tadali commanded her son to leave, and it tore open raw and aching scabs in Raksha’s heart. He, too, was a well-respected Alfiq’s disappointing jekosiit of a son, even if he had better sense than to steal an irreplaceable holy relic and sell it to a skooma lord. The skooma lord, of course, resided in Moonlit Cove.

On the way there, Raksha still picked up a commission to harvest the variety of prune morels that grew in the cove. If he was going to be in the area, he might as well make the most of it. Sympathy alone never did manage to pay for a room at the inn, after all, and killing a skooma lord to take back a priceless treasure was also a simple task in the end.

The fourth time…

The fourth time.

Abnur Tharn saw fit to visit Sai Sahan in Tideholm. He sent a letter in advance, saying he had important business to discuss, and that he would be bringing a friend.

“What friend?” Raksha had asked, trying to keep his voice steady and professional. _Do not get excited,_ he told himself, and tried to force his tail to behave.

“He didn’t elaborate,” Sai had replied, as gruffly as ever. “He just talked about a threat to Southern Elsweyr.” It was a small blessing that Sai Sahan seemed to be terrible at reading body language, whether it belonged to Khajiit or anyone else.

When Raksha saw the portal of light open up in Nahfahlaar’s chamber, his eyes had grown wide, his ears were fully upright, and he made no effort to hide it. The last time he had seen Cadwell, it had been at Khamira’s coronation. He’d been offered a position as the Queen’s Claw, he told Raksha, and said that he had accepted it. Raksha had eagerly congratulated him, and on some level, he was relieved to know that at least for a few years, he would only have to travel to Rimmen, without the hassle of inevitably being sent somewhere completely inconvenient by Coldharbour’s defenses. For all he insisted that he never knew where they were going to go, Cadwell’s portals were the only methods in and out of the place that worked properly, that actually could be guaranteed to open somewhere reasonable and safe.

Abnur Tharn emerged from the portal first. Queen Khamira of Anequina followed soon after. The portal closed behind her, and she stumbled, bending over and catching her breath as if she had run the distance from Rimmen to Tideholm on her own two feet.

“ _Moons,_ Tharn,” Khamira swore. “How do you stand it? My head pounds like a drum!”

“You get used to it,” Tharn replied. “And that was your best one yet.”

As Sai and Tharn fell back into the same pattern as ever, an almost comforting backdrop of insults and dismissal, Raksha rushed to Khamira’s side and helped her stand upright without falling over.

“Thank you, five-claw,” she said, and paused to retch. “By the Moons, my head spins from that. Cadwell made it look so easy.”

His eyes flashed wide for a moment. “That portal was your work?”

“Indeed it was,” said Khamira. “Cadwell acquired his abilities after attuning at the Shadow Dance Temple. Tharn suggested I might have the same ability, and has been helping me to learn to use it.” She sighed, and shook her head. “Though, just between us, he is not the most patient teacher.”

Raksha’s ears twitched, subtly, though he kept them upright. “Why did you not simply ask Cadwell to bring you here? Did he not become your Queen’s Claw?”

Khamira looked off to the side, ears slightly askew. “I did offer him the position, and he did initially accept it, but…”

He watched her face as she spoke, and waited long enough to be sure that he was not interrupting a queen.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

“I am not certain,” she said, uneasily. “But I believe I may have deeply upset him.”

Now his ears were beginning to tilt back. “How could you have upset him?”

She cast a glance at Sai Sahan and Abnur Tharn to one side, then back to the great figure of Nahfahlaar on the other. Raksha recognized the gesture for what it was, and discreetly waved her over to a pillar in a far corner. They circled around the back of it, breaking line of sight with both the two men and the dragon, and spoke quietly in Ta’agra.

“The two of you are old friends,” said Khamira, “and it seemed like you are very close. Especially given—how you reacted, in the temple, when it seemed as though he had died. And the state you were in after you had to kill the Betrayer.”

Raksha nodded, his eyes cast downward. “We have not known each other for as long as it may seem, and yet, it feels like we have known each other for a very long time.”

She trilled at him. “I have had a suspicion, since then, that it is even more true than it ‘seems’ and ‘feels’.”

He lifted his gaze to meet hers. “What do you mean?”

“Do you remember when you aided me in becoming attuned?” Khamira asked. “When Anequina performed her attunement, Khunzar-ri accompanied her and activated the relics. Because of my blood, the temple identified me as Anequina, but I needed another to activate the relics on my behalf, as well. In the spur of the moment, I told you, ‘you must be Khunzar-ri.’ At the time, I meant it as a poetic statement.” She sighed heavily, shaking her head. “The more I have sat with Anequina’s memories, however, the more I have begun to wonder if it is, perhaps, more literal than that. But I could not be sure.”

Raksha’s eyes softened with understanding. “So you asked Cadwell.”

She nodded. “It was foolish of me. I realized how foolish the moment I saw the look on his face. I never should have thought it was reasonable to ask the man who murdered Khunzar-ri in a previous life.” Her ears lowered further still. “And yet, all he said to me was that he could not answer for you, and that I should ask you myself, instead. Then he left the room, and no one saw him in Rimmen ever again.”

“You intended no harm,” said Raksha, “and this one believes Cadwell would understand that. He would not hold it against you.” He patted her on the shoulder, smiling gently at her. “Besides, his disappearance may not stem from your actions. The timing may simply be coincidence. It is not the first time he has suddenly wandered off from a vocation of great honor without warning. The Queen of Rimmen now stands in the same position as the Prince of Light.”

Something like a wistful smile slipped across her face, though they both knew these were empty words of comfort. Even empty words of comfort were capable of saying, _I do not want you to suffer_.

The fourth time Raksha went to Moonlit Cove, he was starting to understand why it felt so familiar. It was still only a feeling, a tugging familiarity, but now Khamira had spoken its shape out loud. It felt as if he could sense the place where his body met his shadow, as if this was a place where the reflection in the mirror sometimes had the right to move first.

“We’re looking for a door,” said Sai Sahan, as they walked into the vestibule. “An ancient door hidden behind a waterfall.”

“To the southwest,” Raksha found himself saying. It was as if his mouth acted on its own, speaking aloud without him willing it to.

Sai raised an eyebrow. “Yes, that’s where Queen Khamira thought we should look. How did you—?”

“Process of elimination,” he said, trying to gather himself together. “Raksha’s work has brought him to Moonlit Cove many times before. There are relatively few places where such a door could be.”

“Fair enough,” Sai said, nodding at him. “I will follow your lead, then.”

The feeling pulled him forward, guiding him through the caverns with the same ease he would have navigating his childhood home in Senchal. The Ruddy Fangs were even less of an obstacle for Raksha and Sai together than they were for Raksha alone. They never broke their stride, not needing to pause to take their bearings even once before Raksha was plowing through a waterfall into the corridor behind it. Puddles formed on the ground beneath his feet as he approached the door at the end.

It was locked, of course, with a ward hovering in the air before it. Raksha sighed, and shook some water from his fur as Sai came up behind him.

“I’ve seen elaborate locks such as this in the past,” said Sai, stroking his beard as he stared thoughtfully at a fragment of a tablet on the wall.

The Khajiit nodded at him. “It’s a magical seal. The tablet probably needs to be reformed before the door will open.” He cracked his knuckles and stretched his arms. “You should stay here. Retrieving the pieces will be faster if this one does it alone.”

He was not entirely sure this was actually true, as now he was having to move away from the pulling sensation, back out into the main caverns. It would not guide him to the fragments. As he re-emerged from behind the waterfall, however, he caught a glimpse of a small glowing figure on the banks—a young Alfiq woman in traveling clothes, ears and tail attentively upright.

“This way, five-claw,” he heard a deep, baritone voice say, and the Alfiq turned, running off into a nearby cavern. Raksha ran after her, following as closely as he could manage.

She twisted and turned through the caverns with the steady pace of those who have no need to breathe, and she sprinted over the springs with the ease of a water strider streaking across the surface of a pond. The voice encouraged and directed him as he followed, with an urgent, yet patient kindness—“Over here, five-claw.” “Your goal is near.” “Another few steps.”—and then the Alfiq stopped, standing beside a fragment of stone. It was buried among mushrooms, and almost entirely covered over in moss and lichen. Raksha would have certainly overlooked it, had he been searching on his own. He never would have thought to pick it up.

The other pieces of the tablet were much the same. The Alfiq and the voice led him through the cove, guiding him to lost and forgotten hiding places that had lain untouched for thousands of years. When he had found them all, the Alfiq smiled at him with a gentle squint of her eyes.

“This one knew you could do it,” the voice purred, like a proud father.

He knew this Alfiq. He could not remember from where or when, but he knew her, and something about this praise brought tears to his eyes.

When Raksha returned to Sai Sahan and set the pieces in place, it was difficult to clean it off, and just as difficult to read. He translated it for Sai from ancient Ta’agra:

> These are the words  
>  And the words are true
> 
> Here lies a child of Jone and Jode  
>  Born of clouds, courage, and moonlight  
>  A tear of joy fallen from the eye of time  
>  When madness brought a smile to his face
> 
> Honor and remember him  
>  By the name he chose for himself
> 
> What name was this?

“Khajiit and their riddles,” Sai mused. “Sadly, I do not know enough of their legends to understand who these things refer to. Perhaps Abnur—”

“Khunzar-ri,” said Raksha, quietly. Once again, it was almost as if someone else was using his mouth to speak.

The ward before the door disappeared, and there was the sound of a great stone lock grinding out of place within the walls.

Sai nodded to him, pleased. “Excellent work, my friend. I should have realized a scholar like you would know the answer.” He turned to the doors, shoving them open easily with his bare hands. “I expect we're about to enter an ancient Khajiiti tomb. Let's see what awaits us inside.”

What awaited them was a grotto containing a large underground lake. Water and vines cascaded down from small openings in the cavern’s dome, filling the air with a soft mist. A walkway lined with stone lanterns led forward into the center of the lake, ending in a platform holding a massive stone sarcophagus. The glowing Alfiq was waiting for them, sitting at the beginning of the walkway, and rising to lead them forward as they approached.

Sai’s eyes grew wide. “A ghostly cat? Do you see this too, my friend?”

Raksha’s only reply was a solemn nod before he brushed past the Redguard warrior and followed the ghost down the walkway. She sat beside the sarcophagus and turned to look at him, expectantly. The lid of the sarcophagus was heavy, with a life-sized carving of a Pahmar-raht lying in repose. Even so, it was not the first time he had needed to open a large coffin, and the lid slid aside with surprisingly little effort for his frame.

Inside laid a large Khajiiti skeleton. Nothing remained but the bones.

Sai Sahan slowly drew closer to his friend’s side, and peered down at the sarcophagus with a puzzled look on his face.

“I do not understand,” he said. “Why have we been led to this?”

Raksha said nothing in reply, and turned to the ghostly figure of the Alfiq.

“This place is empty,” said Raksha, staring down at the Alfiq. “There is nothing here that this one did not bring with him.”

“That is not strictly true,” said the voice. “There is something here that Zar left behind, because he did not have use for it anymore. Now the Anequina of this age has need of it, and he has come to retrieve a small piece for her sake.” The Alfiq curled her tail, smiling at him with her eyes again. “It is good to see you again, old friend.”

Sai took a step back, his mouth opening as if to speak, and then looked at Raksha. The Cathay’s arms were crossed, and he continued to stare down at the Alfiq with a serious expression.

“You are Zar’s Alfiq scribe,” he said, slowly. “His dearest friend, from long before the kra’jun. Yet your voice does not match your image.”

“This one has lived many lives since the time of the kra’jun,” said the Alfiq, in the familiar voice of a young woman. “Zar remembers her as a young scribe, eager to see the world in all its pain and glory.” The voice changed, becoming deep and sonorous, almost stately in its regality. “He has also been a mighty Lord, leading his troops to victory with his most trusted Captain upon his back.” It changed once more, becoming a low alto, melodious and musical. “When they return to the Sands Behind the Stars, their stay is a short one, for Azurah is nothing if not understanding. As warm as the dunes of sugar are, they love gentle Nirni and her children, in all their imperfections and flaws, and Azurah would never separate a cat from their truest love.”

If Raksha had been paying closer attention to his companion, he might have worried that Sai Sahan’s eyes were about to fall out of his head. But he was concerned with other matters at the time.

He slowly reached down into the sarcophagus, and with delicate care, he withdrew a claw from the tip of the skeleton’s hand.

“Wait,” said Sai, horror dawning on him. “We are here to take a claw from the remains of a legend?”

Raksha held the claw before his face, considering it. “A rib, a femur, but a claw is least cumbersome.” He shifted his gaze to meet Sai’s eyes. “Do not look so surprised. The remains of a Khajiiti legend hold great power. Khamira will be able to use its power to walk the Jonelight Path.”

“The Jonelight Path?” Every word out of Raksha’s mouth only seemed to confuse him further. “What is that?”

“It is—” He stopped for a moment, nearly bringing the claw to his mouth as he clasped it in thought. “It is dangerous. But it is a way to reach Dragonhold, and that is enough.”

“Accept this final gift,” said the Alfiq. “A quick path back to your kra’jun.” With a casual flick of her tail, a portal of light formed before them. “Now go, and hurry. This one is eager to see how this chapter of your story unfolds, this time around.”

Before Sai or Raksha could respond, the Alfiq had vanished without a trace.

☙

“I see,” said Jyggalag. “There are a number of ways that rebirth can affect a mortal. Some are very subtle indeed.”

“You do not sound particularly surprised,” said Raksha.

The Prince remained unmoving, as much a crystal as the formation he sat upon. “It is not surprising. The prophecy regarding your defeat of Molag Bal had a very narrow focus, perhaps due to the influence of the Elder Scrolls, but the library possessed a broader picture. I remember seeing where your destiny becomes a fiber in the thread that binds Molag Bal, and it was clear from that small part that the whole shape is much larger than the Scrolls let on.”

He turned towards Raksha now, not merely his head, but a movement involving his whole upper body, leaning over him in looming assessment.

“It will probably surprise you more,” he said, “to know that your destiny as a hero of the Planemeld would not have happened at all, if not for Cadwell of Coldharbour.”

The Khajiit leaned back to be able to look up at the false face of his helmet properly. He did not shrink back, and instead his face maintained an air of suspicious curiosity, eyes narrow and one ear tilting to the side.

“How so?” he asked.

Jyggalag did not move for several minutes, and then rose wordlessly from his seat, walking forward once more to gesture glowing pages into the air before him.

“You shouldn’t just say something like that and then not elaborate,” said Raksha.

“I am checking my notes,” said the Prince, as he moved the pages around before his face. “Precision in revelation is of vital importance. Azura has a natural talent for it. I do not. The mistake I made with Molag Bal was to reveal too much. If I had shown him far less, his reaction might have been less severe.”

“This one’s sincerest apologies, then.” He tented his fingers together and gave Jyggalag the smallest of seated bows. “He will wait for you to be ready.”

Honor gave a small shriek of impatience. Raksha reached down and stroked the back of her head. A few minutes passed before Jyggalag nodded to himself, seemingly satisfied with what he had read in the hovering pages.

“The Planemeld,” he said, “was itself an attempt by Molag Bal to prevent his greatest fear from taking place. In the grand tradition of prophecy, however, his efforts only escalated the problem. When the Worm Cult sacrificed you, Cord-Eater, you became a soul shriven, and thus you were reunited with Cadwell of Coldharbour.” He waved a hand at his side and his notes vanished in a small flash of light, then turned back to face Raksha and Honor. “Everything Molag Bal sought to prevent simply took on another shape. He does not yet understand that trying to fight prophecy in this way is like trying to empty a lake with a fork. It is very likely that he will never understand.”

Raksha nodded sagely. “If you had told this one at the time, he would not have believed you, but there were a lot of things he could not believe until after he learned what he needed to understand them.” His tail lifted up, curling at the end as he looked into the grey distance in thought. “There must be nothing more terrifying to a being who desires absolute control than the knowledge that he is destined to change.”

“Indeed,” replied the Prince. “It seems very likely that the driving impulse behind his efforts to draw the Daedric Princes together, to change me into Sheogorath, was that fear, and his anger at being made to feel that fear. It was, in his mind, the appropriate punishment for informing him of his fate. It was my fault that he knew, and therefore my fault that he was afraid.”

“Killing the messenger who brings bad news,” said the Khajiit, “only ensures that no news of any kind will follow.” He glanced to one side for a moment as a thought occurred to him. “Do you hold Raksha’s plan responsible for what was done to you?”

“It would be irrational of me to do so,” said Jyggalag. “You possess no control over Molag Bal’s behavior now, let alone during the early days of Nirn, when you did not even exist as more than a probable aspect of a destined future. There were an infinite number of ways he could have chosen to react to the news. You cannot be held responsible for any of them.”

He returned to the crystal and sat down again. “I would like to ask how you came up with the plan. Even if it is destined to happen, destiny is constructed from decisions, and decisions are shaped by the knowledge we possess. You did not know any of this until recently, and yet, you knew enough to step into your role with ease. What did you know?”

“Raksha’s plan to change Molag Bal,” he said, “came out of knowledge of the legends of Molag Bal.”

“I see,” said the Prince. “Could you elaborate on the details?”

“Certainly,” said Raksha, with a nod. “It is known that there was, once, a meeting of Molag Bal and Vivec. It is not possible to know what really transpired, but there are two versions told of what happened. One version is told by Vivec. The other is told by the Xivilai of Coldharbour.”

Jyggalag nodded. “Vivec, like Sotha Sil, is also ultimately a mortal. The one who has resisted mortality with the most success, but still thinks as a mortal, sees as a mortal, lives as a mortal. It is very possible that he may live forever, a true immortal, and still remain mortal at heart.”

“This one suspects he would be flattered by that statement,” replied Raksha.

“Truth is not flattery,” said Jyggalag. “I have, however, led us on a tangent. I apologize. Please continue.”

“The two versions of the tale align in some ways and diverge in others,” continued the Khajiit, “but the Daedric tale specifies that Vivec left Molag Bal with a shameful weakness that even the Void could not eliminate, while Vivec mentions no such thing. This one realized that it must be something that Daedra would clearly recognize that Vivec would not—a permanent change to Molag Bal’s Vestige. A significant enough change would even have an effect on his morphotype: what the Xivilai referred to as a Hole.”

“Your plan, then,” said Jyggalag, “is to catalyze this change in his vestige, where he has tried to halt its progress.”

“Yes,” said Raksha. “Though this one must admit, he did not consider what the results might be.” He gestured to the Prince with an open hand. “What if it is like your experience? Would it produce another Sheogorath? Would the Prince that Molag Bal becomes be far worse than what he is now? It may seem impossible, but before madness came into being, it would have been just as unimaginable.”

“It would depend on the nature of the change,” said Jyggalag. “You have no direct evidence, only hearsay, but it may be possible to glean something from the nature of that hearsay.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean,” he replied, “is that weakness is not universal, and is instead relative. What Molag Bal and Coldharbour would consider a weakness is not always what Daedra of other realms consider weakness. Whatever it is, it must be a departure from what he has always defined as strength.” Jyggalag nodded, thoughtfully. “A powerful wound indeed. If only Vivec knew.”

“Perhaps,” said Raksha, “it’s best if he does not know. The only certainty of Vivec in this time is that he lives, and does not die.”

“That is something which only Vivec can know, if it is possible to know,” said Jyggalag, looking up at the walls of the Umbilic Torus. “There are things even the Great Library could never predict.”

“Is this one of them?” asked Raksha.

Jyggalag gave no reply. He stared at the walls of his domain, as if his gaze bore through them and into the Void itself.

☙

He was well aware that somewhere, in one thin slice of reality, his hand rested on the hilt of Dawnbreaker. If he could draw it, it might not be enough to defeat Sheogorath, but it certainly would be enough to give him pause, make him think twice about continuing this charade.

The problem was that it was impossible to _find_ that layer. He would reach for it and find himself touching a dozen other things instead—a Breton sword, a steel spanner, his own belt buckle. He was fumbling around in the dark for a torch, and finding everything but the torch.

“It’s a hundred layer cake,” said Sheogorath, pouring himself a cup of tea, “if you want to be precise about it. Though, come to think of it, does it matter if it’s a hundred layers? If you count them all and there’s only ninety-nine, are you going to be that disappointed? A cake’s still a cake, except when it’s legally a biscuit. Anyway! Have some wine.”

Cadwell was seated in an uncomfortably gargantuan arm chair at the end of a grand dining table, placed under the canopy of a large willow in a clearing in the woods. The whole table was set for tea with delicate silverware and nearly translucent Alinor porcelain, decorated with finely painted floral motifs and ringed with gold leaf, as if Sheogorath was expecting at least a dozen Altmer nobles to arrive and join them. There was a pot of tea, a sugar bowl, and what looked like a tall but otherwise very ordinary cake frosted with buttercream, though with Sheogorath, Cadwell was not willing to assume anything was exactly what it looked like at a glance. As far as he could tell, however, there was no wine.

“No, thank you,” said Cadwell. “Never been a fan of wine, to be honest.”

“Good thing for you that there isn’t any, then,” replied Sheogorath, cheerfully. He was seated at the nearest corner of the table to Cadwell. It felt like he was excessively close, right in his personal space, in spite of the excessive size of the arm chair.

(The arm chair was massive. The arm chair was huge. He genuinely worried that he might fall into the gaps around the seat cushion if he wasn’t careful. He found himself wondering if it was somehow getting bigger when he wasn’t paying attention to it.)

“Have a piece of cake, at least,” said Sheogorath, who had suddenly produced a cake knife and serving spatula without Cadwell having noticed it. He watched uneasily as the Lord of Madness sliced into the cake. There was nothing expressly menacing about the action; he was, indeed, simply cutting a cake, the same as anyone else would. The wedge extracted revealed the inside of the cake to be made out of countless layers of crepes stacked with a soft cheese, white chocolate ganache, and something that stained a few layers a rosy pink.

He was unable to identify what the pink stain was. That alone was unnerving.

“Afraid I have to pass on that, too,” replied Cadwell. “Not really feeling that peckish at the moment.”

“And you call yourself a madman.” Sheogorath took the wedge for himself and began to chip away at it with a filigreed silver fork. “That’s the problem here, of course. You call yourself a madman, but what you really are is a _thief_.”

A frisson of terror ran down Cadwell’s spine. “I’m not a thief,” he insisted. “I’ve stolen nothing from you.”

Sheogorath laughed. “Oh, you’ve stolen nothing, have you? You haven’t been wandering around Coldharbour for four eras pretending that you’re deluded enough to think you’re a knight, without ever _really_ tilting at any windmills. ‘Look at me, ha, I think I’m rescuing fair maidens and defeating evil blackguards, isn’t that a lark’ and never mind you actually _are_ saving other soul shriven from torture and sending Dremora caitiffs to the Void while you mock yourself to Heart’s Grief and back.” He took a bite of cake and then shook the end of his fork disapprovingly. “Madness is not an _aesthetic_ , Cadwell. You can’t just declare yourself ‘Sir Cadwell of Codswallop’, throw in a few non sequiturs, compare Abnur Tharn to a princess, and call it a day. You’ve made off with all the benefits of delusions without any of the dues, and that is absolutely not cricket! Or rugby. Or even Pin the Tail on the Grummite, for that matter.”

“I’m not pretending to be mad,” said Cadwell. “I’m not pretending anything. This is just how I am.”

“You’re wearing a pot on your head,” Sheogorath noted, “and you damn well know pots aren’t helmets. You _know_ it’s ridiculous, and the whole point of wearing it is _because_ it’s ridiculous. And you know, that part’s fine, I can respect that. That’s a good solid foundation for a fine compulsion. But then you had to go and start pretending that you _don’t know_ it’s ridiculous, that you _don’t know_ that wearing a pot on your head is daft, and that is, ironically, so daft it’s not daft anymore. You’re trying too hard.”

Without consciously meaning to, Cadwell’s hand gravitated up to his pot, resting on it protectively, as if he expected the Madgod to steal it at any moment.

“You’re so close to having a real delusion,” said the Prince of Madness, wistfully. “You could get there if you just tried a little harder. Delusions come in two flavors: the famous kind and the other kind.” He leaned on the table with one elbow, waving the fork conspiratorially as he spoke. “The famous kind, that’s what you’re pretending to have. That’s where you believe an absurd thing and you don’t know it’s not true, and no one can convince you it isn’t. That stands out to people who aren’t mad, like a bowerbird with a pearl. Draws everyone’s attention, so of course everyone remembers it. Makes for good ‘look how crazy I am’ scenes in books and theatre, so writers and actors absolutely love it.”

He pointed his fork at Cadwell, stabbing the air to punctuate each statement. “But the other kind—that’s when you believe something you _know_ isn’t true, and _you still can’t help yourself_. That’s the good stuff, Cadwell. That’s the kind of delusion that tears down dynasties. One good bout of magical thinking can reshape an entire civilization. You nearly got there with the pot on your head, this whole ‘I can’t wear real armor, I have to wear kitchen supplies’ thing, and then you had to go and ruin it with pretending you don’t know the difference.”

Cadwell sank further into the arm chair, though it put no more distance between him and the table than he’d had before.

“All right,” he admitted, patting at the pot. “I know it’s not a helmet. I know none of it is actually armor. I know it’s hardly any protection at all, even if it is better than nothing.”

“That’s a good start,” said Sheogorath, weaving his fingers together. The fork stuck out between his knuckles at an awkward angle. “Go on.”

He sighed. The sigh went deep, the breath he drew in seeming to travel down through the entire length of his body before returning upwards to exit through his mouth. “The thing is, I have to do this. I have to. If I’m not at least _pretending_ to be someone honorable, pretending that I’m a good person, pretending that I’m helping people just because it’s the right thing to do, pretending that I’m the kind of person who does the right things because they’re the right things to do, then I’m just—” He stopped, taking a deep breath again. “Then I’m just me. And I’m not a good person.”

“Excellent!” The Prince of Madness clapped with approval, the fork precariously perched between the index and middle finger of one hand. “Now _that’s_ material we can work with. It’s been too long since I’ve workshopped a good guilt complex.”

Cadwell frowned at him. “Workshopped?”

“Well, we’ve established that it’s no fun at all if I just kill you,” replied Sheogorath. “And I can’t just let you keep stealing from my people, now, can I? So I’m going to do one better. I’m going to make a real madman out of you, Cadwell.”

He watched as the Madgod poured himself another cup of tea. His original cup had been shoved off to one side, cold and unfinished.

“Now, then,” said Sheogorath, settling back into his seat with his new cup perched in his hands. “How do you feel about washing hands?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope nobody here knows too much about the biology of ducks. There are some peer-reviewed journal articles I've read that are just, like. "[Thousand Yard Stare Into The Distance] ...ducks. It had to be _ducks_."
> 
> I actually personally interpret the Spirit Alfiq in-game as not talking at all, since the voice that talks to you is the same voice actor as Khunzar-ri's spirit, so it makes sense for it to be Khunzar-ri talking to you before you've actually met. However, enough people think otherwise that I decided it was an opportunity to have Fun with Gender in the context of reincarnation, and who doesn't enjoy a bit of Alfiq Scribe Really Did Get To Be A Senche-Raht.
> 
> Sheogorath is apparently more of a fan of egodystonic delusions than egosystonic delusions. This is probably nepotism more than anything else. ~~Cluster B Disorders would like to know your location, Madgod~~


	5. The Persistence of Memory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's been waiting a while. It's one of the more important ones, so I wanted to be sure I got it right. Not sure if I did or not, but I don't have a beta reader for IG right now, so all I have to check for quality is Enough Time Putting My Eyeballs Somewhere Else.
> 
> This is the chapter where I have to check off the Major Character Death warning. Tread carefully when it comes to psychological manipulation, alcohol abuse, unreality, and delusional thinking.

Stone reliefs in the Halls of Colossus depict the betrayal of Khunzar-ri as a dramatic event: a man in armor shoving a sword through the Pahmar-raht’s back, who clutches the blade emerging from his chest as he roars to the heavens. In some Moon-Singer traditions—the stories that give the Voice to Nurarion, the stories that make Flinthild the one who fell in love—it was said that the evening after Anequina rose from leader to queen, the Betrayer of Khunzar-ri came to him, demanding the dragons’ power, and would not take no for an answer.

Neither of these versions are quite right, though they are not entirely wrong, either. It was not a sword that killed Khunzar-ri, and the last words the hero heard had nothing to do with dragons.

It was a cloudless evening, with both Jone and Jode enveloped in shadow, when the Betrayer entered Khunzar-ri’s tent. What all the stories omit is that he entered with an invitation.

They do not talk about the row that Khunzar-ri and Anequina had hours before, the same argument as every other they’d ever had. They do not speak of Khunzar-ri, after Anequina stormed off, throwing an arm around the Betrayer’s shoulders and proposing a shared round or several of rum in his tent. In reply, the Betrayer said he had something to take care of first, but perhaps after sundown, if that was all right. The Laughing Lion eagerly agreed.

In truth, Cadwell had nothing to take care of first. His heart had leapt into his throat and he needed the time to swallow it back into his chest. He spent the hours until sunset in his own tent sharpening his weapons, and fruitlessly trying to clean the mace from Abagarlas.

“He just wants to use you,” he seemed to remember a voice saying. “He’s figured out that you’re an easy target, and the rum will help him ignore what a hideous thing you are. It provides an excuse for the morning, as well.”

It was obviously not memory. Still, what the voice said made sense. If it had been anyone other than Khunzar-ri, he would have nodded in full agreement.

Cadwell began to set the mace aside.

“Perhaps you do not mind being used,” the voice seemed to have said. “Perhaps the brief moment of potential satisfaction is worth the desperate fumbling of a drunken fool. But consider what might happen.”

He stopped, and tilted the mace upright to consider it.

“You may find yourself plagued with remembrance,” said the voice, “Enough to change your mind once you are in the heart of it, yet unable to do a thing against an inebriated beast. Such a simple, common thing—not drunk enough to easily fight off, but too drunk to recognize when overtures are no longer welcome.”

“He’s not a _beast_ ,” Cadwell started to say.

“The point is how mundane it is,” the voice insisted, not letting him continue. “No special malice is required for it to happen. It’s a normal consequence of the difference in power. You should take something with you for self-defense. Something with enough force behind it to even the odds.”

He ended up strapping the mace to his belt before heading out.

When Cadwell arrived at Khunzar-ri’s tent, he found that the Khajiit had already cracked open a barrel of moon sugar rum. From the look on his face as he greeted Cadwell and welcomed him in, he also seemed to have made his way through a few mugs in advance.

“This is a time of great celebration,” said Khunzar-ri, beaming. “The kra’jun has succeeded, just as this one always thought they would.”

“You were right, I have to grant you that.” Cadwell’s knees angled awkwardly as he settled down onto a nearby cushion. It took a bit of arrangement to get his legs into a position that didn’t seem gangly and all over the place, like he had forgotten how to control his own limbs.

“Please, have a drink,” continued Khunzar-ri, offering him the mug.

He held up one hand to push it back. “Not right now. Maybe in a bit.”

“A wise call,” Cadwell heard the voice say. “If you remain sober while he drinks, you maintain an advantage over him.”

It took a great deal of effort not to scowl.

“Is everything all right, friend?” The Pahmar-raht hovered over him, seemingly without realizing he was doing it. The rum on his breath was heavy, and there was worry in his eyes.

“It’s fine,” said Cadwell. “Just a bit of business before pleasure, as they say.”

“Khajiit do not have such a saying,” said Khunzar-ri. He relaxed and sat back again, cupping his mug of rum in both hands. “But this one supposes it is a Nede saying, no?”

“Not so much Nedic as western Cyrod,” he replied. “They’re very serious out in the Highlands, I gather.”

“If they are serious by the standards of a serious people, they must be very serious indeed.” Khunzar-ri lifted his mug up and took another drink before continuing. “Then this one should ask—what business of yours demands such attention, five-claw?”

Cadwell propped an elbow up on his thigh, leaning towards Khunzar-ri and resting his chin in his hand. “Well, we’ve defeated the dragons. That means, as we agreed, there’s the matter of my payment.”

“Ah,” said Khunzar-ri. His ears twitched slightly with disappointment. “Of course. Yes. You have been promised—”

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Cadwell. “I don’t want the treasure. You can keep all of it.”

His ears bolted upright and his golden eyes were wide and shining. “Cadwell! Do not misunderstand, there is plenty to go around, this one is just—”

“I’m not implying that you don’t have enough,” he said. “It’s not having mercy on you because I think you can’t pay. I mean what I said—I don’t want the treasure anymore. I want something else.”

The voice said nothing, but tutted quietly. Cadwell could practically hear the smirk in it.

Khunzar-ri tilted his head. “What is it that you want instead, friend?”

In spite of his annoyance at the voice, he did have a brief flash of unprompted fantasy, imagining his response in the form of climbing into Khunzar-ri’s lap. He probably wouldn’t protest; if anything, he’d be grateful for the distraction.

That was the problem.

“What I want,” said Cadwell, “is for you to take off the mask. Just once.”

His whiskers twitched. “Khunzar-ri does not understand. He does not wear a mask.”

“Bollocks.” He drew himself upright, his back straight, holding his knees to keep from falling backward. “You’re _always_ wearing a mask. All the time, even with yourself. You’re always Khunzar-ri, you’re always the Hero, and you never put it down.”

The Pahmar-raht glanced away, his ears angling to the sides. “It is true that this one hides behind an illusion of his own making. But that is not like a mask. With a mask, there is still something to find underneath.” His whiskers quivered slightly. “With illusions, take away one and there will always be another. It is not possible to see what illusions cover. It may not even exist.”

For a time neither of them said anything. Khunzar-ri brought his mug up again and took a long drink, and still did not look Cadwell in the face.

“You lied a bit, didn’t you,” said Cadwell, softly.

The Khajiit’s gaze snapped to stare at him, and his ears were angled back hard, now. He held the mug of rum close to his chest.

“A while ago, you said you were like a kitten in an offering box,” Cadwell continued. “The box was small, and you wanted out of it. Then the lid was blown off in a storm, and you said you ‘seized the moment’ to escape.” He let one of his hands fall from his knee to rest on the rug. “But the world is huge and terrifying, especially for a kitten who’s never seen it before. You were scared. You wanted to go back into the box, back to safety, but you couldn’t. So you found another box labeled ‘Khunzar-ri’, and you climbed into it, and you felt safe again.”

His expression softened, though his ears remained low. “So you have seen through Khajiit’s ruse.”

“It’s not a ‘ruse’ to be scared,” said Cadwell. “But it’s still a box, even if it’s finely engraved and gilded with gold leaf.”

“Perhaps not gold leaf, friend,” he replied. “Even that is a bit too rich for Khunzar-ri’s tastes.”

“It might not have the gold leaf yet,” he admitted, “but it’s about to.”

The fear had returned to Khunzar-ri’s face with this statement, along with a hint of disbelief. Cadwell took a deep breath, and let it out as slowly as he could manage. He did not want to do this. He was going to have to do this.

“I know what you were fighting over,” he said, in halting Ta’agra. “I know that Rass Le is about to become queen, and that she wants you to be her king.” Cadwell knew his accent was thick, but it was clear from the Khajiit’s expression that he had understood every word.

“How long have you been listening?” he asked, with the quiet, scholarly tone he had in Ta’agra.

“The whole time,” said Cadwell, solemnly. “The most useful tool for escaping a prison is a tongue that the guards are too proud to learn.”

His expression settled with an orthodox solemnity. It looked wistful in the way it did when he thought no one was watching.

“Please do not hold it against her,” he said. “Rass Le is in a difficult situation. She must marry, and she must bear heirs. Even if she were not a Queen, her tribe would require it.”

Cadwell nodded. “I understand that part. Her situation doesn’t change how you feel about it, though.”

He took a long drink before replying to this. It was long enough that his breath was heavy, almost panting, when he lowered his mug.

“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Zar does not want to marry, he does not want to have children, and he does not want to be a king. He does not want to lose the freedom to travel as he wishes, to stay when he wishes to stay and leave when he wishes to leave.” He stared down into his drink. “But this one does not have a choice. If he does anything else, he will lose the woman he loves.”

“But then what Rass Le gains,” said Cadwell, “is a miserable husband. Is that really what she wants? It seems like even if she wins, you both lose.”

Zar sighed. “She thinks this one will eventually become accustomed to it. That he will ‘grow up’.”

He frowned. “You already _are_ grown up.”

“No,” said Zar, with a sad smile. “As you noted—at heart, this one is a frightened ja’khajiit, hiding inside a beautiful box.”

“Why are you even trying to talk him out of this?” asked the voice, with clear irritation. “He’s made it clear he won’t listen to you. This woman is the most important person in his life, enough that he will choose to be miserable for her. You cannot stand against that. You will never be that important to anyone. The more you argue with him, the more he will simply resent you for your stubborn resistance.”

Cadwell was sure that, to Zar, this looked like a period of silence and consideration. It felt like there was a massive ball of snakes inside him, twisted and writhing, kept inside only by force of will. If he opened his mouth to speak, no words could come out: there would be an eruption of snakes.

He clenched his jaw. His throat tightened to the point of sharp pain. Against everything, he managed to force words to emerge.

“Your friend, the scribe,” he said, in Nedic, because Ta’agra was hard enough in the best of times. “She said that Anequina was jealous of her, no matter how much reassurance she was given.”

The Khajiit nodded. “Anequina made a very similar demand, once. Send the scribe away, or she would leave. Zar wished her well. He did not see her again until he sought her out while building the kra’jun.”

“Your friend also told me to be careful,” said Cadwell, “or else Anequina would be jealous of me, as well.”

He let out a stab of laughter, devoid of humor. “Ah, Zar’s friend. Her warning came too late.”

The marrow of his bones hollowed out. His body rattled like chimes on a tripwire. The voice cackled with amusement.

“Ah, so that’s what this is,” it said. “Your final moment of usefulness before you are discarded.”

“You must be joking,” said Cadwell, and he meant it. This could not be real. It couldn’t be what it sounded like.

“It is the will of Zar’s beloved and queen,” said the Khajiit. “Once they are married, her will in all things.” He brought the mug up to his mouth, and emptied it. As he moved to rise to fetch another, Cadwell reached out with one hand to take the mug away from him.

“Stay there,” he told Zar when he looked up at him with wide eyes. “I’ll get it for you. It’s one of your last nights as a free man, after all. You need the rest.” Somehow Cadwell’s voice stayed calm and composed, though he felt neither of these things.

Words he would not say—could not say—kept running through his head as he filled the mug from the barrel of rum. _You thought I didn’t know Ta’agra. When were you planning to tell me this? Before the wedding? After the wedding?_ At _the wedding? Were you hoping you’d never have to say anything at all, that you could go silent without any warning and assume I’d figure it out from context?_

He hated that these were the thoughts he was having, that this was what his mind was going to be filled with during their last moments together.

He looked at Zar’s flattened ears as he handed him the mug of rum. The Khajiit’s gaze never rose from the floor. There was no trace of Khunzar-ri’s bright smile; his face was almost unrecognizable with grief.

This. This was what he was angry with: a broken man, trapped between misery and heartbreak.

As he sat back down on the cushion, he tried to force himself to be angry at Anequina, instead. That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? It was her jealousy and these were her demands.

Cadwell could not remember a single time she’d ever been anything less than polite to him. Her outburst from shock at hearing about the Massacre didn’t count; that was, honestly, the only reasonable response a person could have. She had been more than willing to risk her life for the kra’jun. She’d healed him so many times without any apparent irritation or complaint. Even that time the deadfall trap failed, her argument with Khunzar-ri hadn’t been that he should have been left behind, but that the person who volunteered first should have been the one to go.

There was only one monster here, and it was neither Khunzar-ri nor Anequina.

As the Pahmar-raht downed mug after mug, the sorrow was gradually replaced with a strangely talkative self-abnegation. He told Cadwell, in slurring Ta’agra, that he and the Alfiq scribe should travel together, that they would make a good team. He leaned on Cadwell with one arm as Nurarion and Flinthild were quickly added to the party without a clear transition. He waxed hopeful, almost to the point of incoherence, about the adventures that the heroes of the kra’jun of four would have together, walking the lands of Tamriel fighting injustice and defending the weak.

By the time his Ta’agra was beyond Cadwell’s ability to decipher, he was curled up on his side with his head resting on the Nede’s thigh. He was mumbling in the most intimate register now, which Cadwell could recognize but did not actually _know_ , because no one had ever taught it to him. The only part he could make out at all was something that might have been his name.

Eventually his mumbling trailed off, and Khunzar-ri fell asleep.

Cadwell sat there for several minutes watching the Khajiit’s chest softly rise and fall with his breath. He slipped a hand under Khunzar-ri’s head to support him as he slid his leg back out, and lowered his face very slowly to the rug. Khunzar-ri stayed asleep. His eyes were shut and his expression was finally peaceful.

As he knelt before Khunzar-ri’s face, he reached back with one hand to his side. There was a sharp hiss of breath that belonged to neither him nor Khunzar-ri as his hand hovered over the hilt of the mace.

“Ah, _yes,_ ” said the voice, almost sibilant with approval. “He is entirely at your mercy. It would be such a simple thing—the simplest it’s ever been.”

In a flash of movement, Cadwell’s hand moved down from his belt, drawing the dagger from his boot. Before the voice could speak again, he was holding it with both hands, the blade pointed down at Khunzar-ri. He turned it carefully, until the edge ran perpendicular to the Khajiit’s neck.

“What are you doing?” The voice sounded confused.

The tip of the dagger hovered over the thickest part, close enough to move fur without touching skin. His hands were shaking. His knuckles were turning white.

“Stun him with the mace,” he heard the voice say, urgently, as the hilt grew sweaty from his hands. “Stun him with the mace and he will not wake up, you will have time for imprecision, you will have time—”

With a sharp inhale of breath he whipped the dagger high up over his head, and brought it back down. It pierced the neck just in front of the spine; he felt the sudden loss of resistance as the point resurfaced on the other side. He wrenched the blade forward with as much force as he could manage, slicing out through the throat, through the carotid arteries and jugular veins, until its edge re-emerged in a great spray of blood.

There was so much blood. He’d known there would be—there always was.

He thought he saw Khunzar-ri’s eyes open. He’d hoped he’d be drunk enough to stay out cold, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe these weren’t the usual reflexes, maybe he had woken up and he was looking at him as the blood gurgled in his own throat—

“ _Use the mace,_ ” the voice cried, with something like panic, “it will be instant, it will hasten his end, it will—”

Cadwell ignored the voice, and bent down to place his forehead against Khunzar-ri’s. He shut his eyes and brought up one blood-soaked hand to pet the side of his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

When looked into Khunzar-ri’s eyes again, the pupils were wide enough that the gold of his irises had almost disappeared. Soon after, he stopped moving.

Cadwell did not move for a while himself. He spent a good minute continuing to pet the side of Khunzar-ri’s face, even though he knew he was gone. He was completely drenched in his blood, and the blood was still warm.

It was only when he sat back up that he realized that he was crying. The voice had grown quiet; it said nothing as he tried to wipe away tears and smeared the blood across his face.

“Did you think I would never figure it out?” He was not talking to Khunzar-ri, now. He was talking to the voice.

There was a long silence. It was not the silence of a madman waiting for a response from nothing.

“I would never have thought you had it in you, whelp,” said the voice, simmering low. “You pathetic, worthless piece of filth.”

“Call me all the names you want,” said Cadwell. “He’s beyond your reach now. You’ll never have him.”

“You may have robbed me of my opportunity to claim this soul,” said Molag Bal, “but there is nothing you can do to break the claim I have on yours. The moment you snatched up your master’s most precious prize and smashed his face in, you both became the property of Coldharbour. Forever.”

As he heard these words in his mind, something strange and even darkly humorous happened. Cadwell had never actually planned to survive. The idea had been to kill Khunzar-ri, and then himself. He could never go back to living alone in the savannah after this. But as he heard Molag Bal gloat about his fate, Cadwell found himself determined to live—not out of fear, but out of sheer bloody determination to stick it to him as long as possible, to be a royal pain in the hide with every last beat of his heart.

“This isn’t done yet,” he found himself saying as he rose to his feet.

“You expect to walk away from this?” The Prince scoffed. “You fool. You have made a powerful enemy here, today.”

He nodded solemnly. “They don’t come more powerful than Anequina Sharp-Tongue.”

The Prince of Schemes screamed with outrage in his head, and when the echoes subsided, the mace from Abagarlas was gone.

When Cadwell the Betrayer emerged from the tent, he wore armor soaked in Khunzar-ri’s blood and was carrying the dagger he had used to slay him. With these things and nothing else, he slipped into the wilderness, traveling towards Shadow Dance Shrine through the night.

☙

Sheogorath perched his hands on top of his cane and let out a long, low whistle. “Now that’s what I call a good murder. A great big ugly mess! They don’t make them like that anymore, you know.”

Cadwell knew better than to try and ask who “they” were, exactly, in this context. He leaned against one of the stone brazier plinths, facing away from the edifice of Shadow Dance Temple, and tried to focus on the intense relief that came from finally getting to leave that memory.

“Honestly, a mere scrubbing of hands might be a bit understated at this rate,” continued the Madgod. “Though I suppose you did do the whole body bathing routine in Rimmen an era or two ago, didn’t you?”

He folded his arms across his chest and lifted his eyes to the cavern ceiling. “I did, though it didn’t make much of a difference.”

“Cheer up,” said Sheogorath. “We’re getting to the fun part, now.”

“If you mean the part where Anequina avenges her murdered beloved,” said Cadwell, “then yes, I suppose that’s someone’s idea of a good time.”

He laughed, lifting up his cane to shake the eyeball at him in a mock-scolding gesture. “Oh, beyond even that, Cadwell! This is the part where I get to show you how two and two make a hundred.”

Before he could respond, the portal circle lit up with arcane fire, and a portal of light appeared. Cadwell watched himself burst through, drenched in both new and old blood, wielding the dagger that killed Khunzar-ri in one hand and a Moon-Priest’s sword in the other. The old Cadwell seemed to take no notice of him or the Madgod, dashing past them at full tilt towards the bridge leading to the temple, until Sheogorath lightly tapped the ground with his cane and everything came to a halt.

“You certainly knew how to make an entrance,” said Sheogorath, admiringly, as he circled around the frozen figure. “Is that a bit of spattered brain in your hair?”

“I was pulling out all the stops,” said Cadwell, pushing off of the plinth. “Just an insane, last ditch effort to make it to Jode’s Core, no matter what it took.”

He remembered it keenly, much too keenly for his own comfort. It was so pointless—all it did was kill countless priests and adepts who had done nothing wrong. It was the longest and most needlessly drawn out suicide Tamriel had probably ever seen. He felt sorry for the temple adepts. He felt sorry for Anequina and the Moon-Priests. He felt sorry for Nurarion and Flinthild, for the Alfiq scribe, for everyone left lost and grieving in what should have been a time of celebration.

Cadwell had never actually seen himself from the outside like this, before. He’d always assumed he must have looked like a heartless monster, something merciless and alien. The expression on the face of this frozen figure was contorted with pain, twisted with grief and anguish. Without context, without knowing who this was—he would have felt sorry for him, too.

“I knew I wasn’t going to make it,” he said, not entirely to Sheogorath. “I don’t know why I felt compelled to even try.”

“I don’t know why you’re so focused on how you didn’t make it all the way,” replied Sheogorath. He paused to flick a bloody lock of hair out of the past Cadwell’s eyes. “By all rights, you shouldn’t have even gotten in the front door.”

Cadwell turned and stared at the Madgod, unblinking. “Beg pardon?”

He leaned on his cane and made a casual gesture back towards the portal circle. “Now, now, Cadwell. You _know_ this one. It’s important enough that you elected to tell Cord-Eater about it, in what you thought were going to be your last words.”

His gaze followed Sheogorath’s hand back towards the portal. He blinked at it for a while, first wringing his hands and then rubbing the sides of his temples.

“There _is_ something important there,” he said, his brows furrowed. “But I can’t remember what it is.”

“Let’s cut right to the chase, then,” said Sheogorath. “That’s the portal from Shadow Dance Shrine. Now, how did Khamira activate that portal, Cadwell?”

“Anequina’s pendant,” said Cadwell, his eyes widening. “I told Raksha that it was the key.”

The Prince made a dramatic flourish of his hand. “And how did _you_ get in, Cadwell?”

“I teleported in,” he said, uneasily. “I’d already been attuned—”

“Not the _second_ time,” said Sheogorath. “The first time.” He gestured toward the unmoving figure of the past Cadwell. “How did _this_ bloody screaming arsehole get in? Does _he_ have a pendant, Cadwell?”

“No,” said Cadwell, rubbing at his face with both hands. “No, it was just… it was already open, wasn’t it?”

Sheogorath merely laughed and tapped his cane on the ground again, and Cadwell of the past resumed bolting down the bridge at full speed.

By the time they entered the temple doors, the Moon-Priests within were already lying on the ground, dead or bleeding out. Cadwell of the past was levitating a few inches off the ground before a glowing relic in the center of the chamber. He stared blankly ahead of him with his arms crossed over his chest, his hands still firmly gripping his weapons. An image of Jode hovered over the sword; Jone hovered over the dagger.

“Ah, and here we have the process of attunement,” said Sheogorath. “Do you know what’s wrong with this picture, Cadwell?”

“No, I don’t,” he said, and genuinely meant it. He approached the center of the room cautiously, and found himself unable to stop staring at his past self’s face during attunement. It was such a stark contrast between the bridge and this—from such intense suffering to something so subtle. It was hard to believe both moments involved the same person.

“Fair enough,” said the Madgod. “This might be one you genuinely wouldn’t know. Would’ve only taken one conversation with Khamira or Cord-Eater to find out the truth, but you? Have a difficult conversation?” He chuckled and patted his cane. “That’s never been your cup of tea, has it?”

“Out with it, then,” said Cadwell, firmly. “There’s some horrible detail about attunement you want me to remember and I’m not going to without a reminder.”

“Maybe it’ll be an easier pill to swallow if you hear it from a familiar voice,” said Sheogorath. As he spoke, the fallen Moon-Priests and the hovering figure of the past Cadwell faded away, replaced by Raksha and Khamira standing in front of a darkened relic.

“The temple relic, five-claw,” said Khamira. “Activate it so the process of attunement can continue.”

“Can’t you activate the relic yourself?” asked Raksha.

She shook her head. “Sadly, no, it is not possible, and that is by design. When Anequina performed her attunement, Khunzar-ri accompanied her and activated the relics. The temple identifies me as Anequina, so you must be Khunzar-ri.”

“A security measure,” he said, rubbing his chin. “It makes sense to have such a requirement on something so powerful. But if that’s the case, how was the Betrayer able to force his attunement? No one, not even a hostage, would have aided him in his progress.”

“There will be time for these questions later,” said Khamira. “Please, five-claw, let us get on with it.”

With a clap of Sheogorath’s hands, the figures of Raksha and Khamira faded away, leaving only the darkened temple, the Daedric Prince, and Cadwell.

“Aye, there’s the rub,” said Sheogorath. “It takes two to attune to the Lunar Lattice: one to activate the relics and another to actually perform.” He leaned on his cane, tapping the eyeball with his fingertips. “So who helped you out, Cadwell? Who activated the relics while you were being attuned?”

Cadwell stood quietly for a moment, his face in his hands.

“No one,” he said, in a wavering voice. “They all just… _did things_. On their own, when I approached them. I thought they were supposed to.”

The Prince hummed with amusement. “So, let’s see—the portal _just happened_ to be ready for you when you needed it, no pendant necessary, and to attune, you just walked up to the relics and _they activated themselves?_ Do I have that right?”

This was followed by a moment of silence, still enough for Cadwell to hear the sound of his own breath.

“Yes,” he said, weakly.

“You know how that sounds, Cadwell,” said Sheogorath.

“It’s the truth,” said Cadwell.

His smirk cracked wide and open, and within another second, he lost it, doubled up with laughter at this response. “I’m not calling you a _liar,_ Cadwell! Not about this, at least. It genuinely did all line up perfectly for you.” He rested an elbow on his cane, sighing with amusement. “It all moved itself for you, and no one before you, and no one since.”

Cadwell quietly lowered himself down to sit on the steps leading up to the first relic. None of the sconces or braziers were lit in this instance of Shadow Dance Temple. The only light came from dim moonlight seeping in through thin cracks in the temple ceiling.

“Is this related to the prophecy?” he asked, not looking up at the Madgod. “The one Jyggalag showed Molag Bal, all those years ago.”

“Oh, that old thing,” said Sheogorath, dismissively. “It’s changed its shape a dozen times since then, you know.”

“Changed its shape,” he noted, “but it hasn’t gone away.”

“I’m more a fan of free will, myself,” replied Sheogorath. “Oh, sure, prophecies are a thing, but have you ever looked at one, Cadwell? Really looked at it?”

“Can’t say I have, no,” said Cadwell.

“They’re so damn _vague_. And often, the outcomes are just incredibly obvious.” He flicked his hand around in the air behind his head for emphasis. “If a man lives in a straw hut and smokes a pipe inside every day, and then his house burns down with him in it, is that fate? What about another man who’s so afraid his wife is going to cheat on him, he makes harsher and harsher demands on her until she runs off with the gardener? Where do we draw the line between fate and plain old cause and effect, Cadwell?”

He turned and looked Sheogorath over. The Madgod was, bizarrely enough, seemingly very sincere about this.

“I don’t really know,” said Cadwell.

He snorted. “You don’t know because you _can’t_ know. That’s why prophecies are so vague.” He pivoted on his heel, slamming the stone beneath his feet with his cane as he turned. “Of course, Jyggalag loves the idea of fate. Nothing more orderly than a completely predictable world with no surprises, where no one ever gets an original idea in their head and sets out to _do_ anything.”

As strange as it felt to acknowledge, this was one place where Sheogorath seemed to make perfect sense, especially compared to Jyggalag. He didn’t intend it to be comforting—honestly, he mostly seemed ticked off—but it still was, in its own way.

“If it’s not about fate,” said Cadwell, “then what is it about?”

“Choices,” he replied. “It’s always about choices, Cadwell. Look at Cord-Eater—when push came to shove, the Elder Scrolls never once told him what to do, but the mere fact that _there was a prophecy about him_ convinced other people to get out of his way and let him make the choices he would have made anyway.”

He tilted his head. “Wait, you don’t believe the Elder Scrolls—”

“When you follow a recipe and it makes a cake, you don’t call the cake recipe a ‘prophecy’,” said Sheogorath. “You call it _baking_.”

“But when you’re baking, you get to decide if you’re baking a cake, or biscuits, or what have you,” said Cadwell. “I didn’t get to choose any of this.”

“I didn’t say it was always your choices,” replied the Prince. “Someone’s choices, sure. Jyggalag chose to show Molag Bal a prediction of the future. Molag Bal chose to show his gratitude by turning him into what he hated the most. Choices!”

“So someone else decided it would be a cake,” he said. He turned back and rested his arms on his knees. “Then that’s just as much out of my hands as fate would be.”

The Madgod was suddenly perched on the ground, leaning down by Cadwell’s ear. There had been no motion in his peripheral vision to go with this. He had just been standing in one place, leaning on his cane, and then in the blink of an eye, he was much, much closer.

“Who decided you were going to go to Shadow Dance Temple?” asked Sheogorath, his voice low, like the early rumbling of an earthquake.

Cadwell looked at him from the corner of his eyes. He didn’t dare turn his head.

“You did,” said the Prince, not waiting for a reply. “It was your idea. You decided were going to attune yourself to the Lunar Lattice, and you decided were going to take the power of Jode’s Core. What were you going to do with it, Cadwell?”

He swallowed hard, looking forward again. “I was going to destroy Abagarlas.”

“And then?”

“All the rest,” said Cadwell. “The art-tortures, the flesh sculptures, the slave pens. I was going to tear it all down.”

“Then Anequina killed you before you could make it to the Core,” said Sheogorath, stroking his beard as he eyed Cadwell. “You ended up in Coldharbour, and what did you do?”

His eyebrows raised and a huff of air escaped him, very suddenly. One of his hands had risen to his mouth, as if to catch it.

The Madgod smirked at him. “You did exactly what you wanted to do anyway, Jode’s Core be damned. You didn’t make it to the Core, and it’s Daedra instead of Ayleids, but those are just _details_ , Cadwell. When you’re so bloody determined to make a cake that even death can’t stop you, you aren’t going to let a few missing ingredients get in the way, are you?”

Cadwell pulled back, staring at him incredulously.

“You made this happen,” said Sheogorath, standing up to his full height. “You wanted it badly enough that the fact that it was literally impossible couldn’t get in your way.”

“That’s insane,” said Cadwell.

“Oh, it is,” he said, with a nod, “but it’s also true.”

“No, I mean— _that doesn’t happen_. You can’t just make something happen by wanting it badly enough.”

“Ah, yes, because all of this—” Sheogorath lifted his arms wide and began to turn. Somehow it was clear that he was not merely gesturing towards the temple, but towards everything including it. “This always follows the rules, right? The rules of reality.” He grinned, widely, as if there was some joke in this that Cadwell was not aware of. “And breaking from that—well, that would be dream logic. The kind of thing that only happens in dreams.”

For a while, Sheogorath had been almost terrifyingly sensible in what he was saying. Now, he was back to talking nonsense. Maybe he had always been talking nonsense and Cadwell had just imagined it made sense.

“Fact is, Cadwell,” said the Madgod, “as drenched in blood and guilt as you are, you’re also eyeball deep in the best madness of all. It’s madness to think that you’re dreaming when you’re awake, isn’t it? But then it’s normal to think you’re awake when you’re actually dreaming. It’s just mad to believe you’re dreaming, then, even when it’s true.”

“I’d expect more of this kind of talk from Vaermina,” said Cadwell, though he’d never personally met her.

Sheogorath chuckled. “Oh, believe me, she knows about it. Why do you think she became so interested in dreams? And dreams inside of dreams inside of dreams—the whole layer cake.”

He shook his head. “I’ve heard about this. People who become convinced the world isn’t real and they’re just dreaming, and they jump off a cliff trying to wake up. Terrible waste.”

“Oh, I agree, it’s a waste,” said the Prince. “Trying to wake up is the most boring thing you can do. Besides, you’ve jumped off cliffs yourself how many times now? You know it doesn’t work.”

“There’s also the ones that think that the world is a dream, so they don’t need to eat,” said Cadwell.

Sheogorath nodded. “So they do, so they do. Begs the question, though—what happens when _you_ don’t eat, Cadwell?”

“I’m soul shriven,” he said. “That’s different.”

“Of course,” said Sheogorath, “how silly of me. That’s not even a little bit comparable to a delusion, is it?” He lifted up his hands and began to tick off points on each finger. “Let’s see here—you died and went to Coldharbour. Then your soul was duplicated as a vestige so you could suffer eternally, so you had a whole ‘I’m not even me’ thing going for a bit, and you’re also always sort of a corpse even though your morphotype formed from plasm and your body never left Elsweyr, so it isn’t even a corpse at all.” He waved his hands dismissively. “But of course you can’t even compare that to someone who merely _thinks_ he’s died and had his soul copied and is now a weird undying walking corpse-that-isn’t, because yours is real and he just believes it is, by which I mean he believes none of it is. Right?”

Cadwell stared at him.

“Madness,” continued the Madgod, “is the glue that holds the world together, Cadwell. Denial of it doesn’t make you sane. You should come to the Isles and have a talk with Darius Shano sometime! Might take some doing to convince him you exist, though.”

“I’ll consider it if I’m ever in the area,” said Cadwell, with full intent to never be in the area ever.

He brought his hands back down and softly tapped the stone with the tip of his cane again. “My point is that all the evidence that you think you’ve got isn’t evidence, and meanwhile you’re bending over backwards trying not to think about the things you can’t explain. Can you honestly say you’re in a better situation than if you just let yourself believe something crazy?”

Cadwell knew he shouldn’t consider any of it, shouldn’t even give it a moment’s thought. He hadn’t slept outside of plasm accretion since the Merethic Era. The last time he thought he was dreaming, it was the connection to his soul the whole time, tugging in both directions the moment it was summoned back to Nirn. Believing that the world is a dream—what would that even mean, exactly?

But he did have to admit, Sheogorath had a point: the risks to him, if he believed such a thing, were significantly different from the risk to a random mortal in Tamriel. His context had changed.

This gave him a bit of an idea.

“All right,” he said. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re right—”

Sheogorath’s eyes lit up with glee.

“What in blazes am I supposed to do with that?” asked Cadwell.

“Anything you want,” replied the Prince. “All the impossible things you can only do in a dream, because you’ve realized it’s a dream so it’s not impossible at all.”

Cadwell stood up and walked a short distance, then bent down to pluck a blade of grass that was growing up from a crack in the stone tiles.

“So you’re saying I could take this bit of grass,” he continued, holding it upright in a fist, “and decide that it’s anything I want it to be.”

“Of course,” said Sheogorath.

“And it would actually _be_ whatever I want it to be, then?” asked Cadwell. “It wouldn’t just be an illusion, a delusion, or something worse?”

“Why not?” The Prince of Madness was grinning widely now. “Give it a shot. You might surprise yourself.”

All right. This was going to be the hard part.

Cadwell shut his eyes, and tried to pretend the blade of grass was Dawnbreaker.

It was obviously not. It was a blade of grass. It didn’t have any weight; it wasn’t even close in size. A soft, vegetal scent drifted towards him as it began to crush in his hand.

 _Doesn’t matter,_ Cadwell told himself, furrowing his brow. _Just focus. Make it Dawnbreaker._

He pictured his fingers curled tightly around the hilt. He remembered how it felt in his hand when he drew it in Kilkreath. He imagined the light from the blade and the Dawnstar gem shining brightly enough that the darkness of his closed eyelids turned red—

It turned a bright crimson, and he could feel the warmth of the blade before his face.

Dawnbreaker was in his hand.

Cadwell opened his eyes and swung at Sheogorath in the same moment. He missed, though it was more as though the Madgod was simply not there when the blade should have connected. Cadwell heard him laugh, heartily clapping his hands, and turned to glare at him in his new position, seated on top of a nearby boulder.

“Well done,” said Sheogorath, his applause trailing off. “You even crammed in a suicidal attack while you had the chance. Not that you expected it to connect, I know.”

“You can’t blame me for trying,” he replied.

“Indeed, I can’t.” The Madgod propped up one of his knees and rested an arm on it. “Anyway, Cadwell. You’ve done something impossible again, haven’t you?”

“No, I didn’t do anything at all,” said Cadwell, raising Dawnbreaker to point it at the Prince of Madness. “You did this.”

Sheogorath raised an eyebrow, curiously. “Is that so?”

“You’re in control of all of this,” he continued. “You’ve been in control of it all along. You were going to make it look like anything I imagined happened anyway.” Confidence had returned to his tone: he could feel the way out, feel the other end of the portal opening in the Colored Rooms and holding steady. “So I made sure to imagine something that would turn the tides. Something that you couldn’t fake.”

“Oh, I see,” said the Prince. “So you’ve tricked me, then, have you?”

“Try not to take it personally,” said Cadwell, with a smile. “If Coldharbour couldn’t make a cage that could hold me, your chances weren’t much better.”

With that and a flash of light, he was gone.

Sheogorath remained perched on the boulder a bit longer, tilting his head.

“You can plant a seed in darkness,” he mused, to no one in particular. “Honestly, you don’t even need dirt to sprout it. Just a bit of water and something that holds water. Cloth, paper, almost anything will do.”

He started absentmindedly turning his cane about in one hand, the eye staring at the cracks in the temple ceiling as it circled.

“But if you want that sprout to do more than grow wildly in random directions,” he said, “you’ll need to let it see the sun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun (?) fact: I genuinely wrote a whole alternative "what if Cadwell _didn't_ bring the Mace with him" version of the first scene that is non-canonical in both a TES and IG sense because it completely breaks the timeline. Not sure what to do with it now, but it exists and it will not be lonely in my drafts folder full of weird things that never see the light of day.
> 
> I do regret a little that Cadwell having to be the only Merethic POV character for various reasons means there's no way to show how things look from Anequina's perspective. Another day, another story, perhaps.


	6. The Veiled Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A good half of this chapter has already existed since November, but I felt like I needed to hover over it for some extra time just to be sure it had enough breathing room after how heavy Chapter 5 was.
> 
> Warnings for... some worse-than-usual swearing, and that should be about it.

From the first moment he’d looked on Meridia’s stolid face and known who she was, he thought there was something familiar about her.

There was no time to dwell on it, of course. Everyone else was focused on the plan for defeating Molag Bal—getting Raksha close enough to carry out the ritual sacrifice with the Amulet of Kings and all that—but Cadwell could not help but notice Tharn’s plan said absolutely nothing about anyone’s _survival_.

He’d be fine regardless, as a soul shriven should. Lyris, though? Sai Sahan? A bit too mortal to leave to their own devices. And Raksha—Raksha _should_ have been in the same bucket of Fine No Matter What, except Cadwell honestly had no idea what possession by the Dragon God of Time would _do_ to a soul shriven, exactly.

So the instant he saw her distant figure watching from the sidelines… well, he didn’t even remember throwing down the portal. He just found himself inches away from the stone-faced Prince of Light—the one secretly pulling the strings behind the whole affair—vehemently insisting that she pull a few more strings _to get them out alive_ while she was at it.

He was profoundly surprised when she agreed.

It was a less than stellar starting point for a knight and his lady, and he almost certainly leaned too hard into the role at the beginning to make up for it. Awkward and embarrassing in hindsight, but that’s how life is, sometimes.

And yet, during those months when he had been trying too hard, there were moments. Little fissures in the marble. They were gone so quickly, it was easy to assume he’d just been seeing things.

Cadwell had been too focused on _getting out_ and away from Sheogorath to pay much attention to exactly where his portal was going in the Colored Rooms. It was the Colored Rooms; beyond that, the details didn’t matter. He arrived upside-down and several feet in the air, and fell hard on his face. He elected to lay on the floor for a few minutes until the ache subsided.

As he pushed himself up on his hands and knees, he realized he recognized these floor tiles.

These were Umaril’s chambers.

He’d been here once before, in the Second Era. 582? 583? Somewhere about there. After stopping the Planemeld, but before the visions. At the time, there was something about the space that made him nauseous. He couldn’t figure out why. He just wanted to be done and gone as soon as possible, and once he was, his queasiness subsided.

Now he had enough memory to know why. It was nothing personal; it was just the Ayleid architecture.

Cadwell had been in Umaril’s chambers and he had seen Umaril, but it would have been a stretch to say that they’d ever met. At the time, the Unfeathered was barely more than a skeleton in a stone bath, fully submerged and just beginning to regrow his tendons. Small organelles were visible through the gaps of his ribcage. His stomach was the size of a toddler’s fist. His heart was the size of a thumb.

“How long has he been like this?” Cadwell had asked.

“Over three millennia,” Meridia had replied.

He couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. That was an excessive amount of time to regenerate even for a Daedric Prince, and Umaril was a mere demigod. Even so, he didn’t press the matter. If it was something she wanted him to know, his Lady would tell him.

He had wondered, sometimes, why it was that he never reformed in the Colored Rooms after death. Even at the height of Trying Too Hard, he always came back to Coldharbour.

Cadwell became aware of a light moving in the air above him, and it took him another minute before he recognized her. Meridia had taken the form of an orb of light multiple times before, of course. It seemed to be the shape that came most naturally to her. She was usually much larger than this, however. When Cadwell looked up at the light, she seemed tiny, hardly larger than a torchbug.

“I did not expect you to return from the Umbilic Torus so soon,” she said. “Where is Cord-Eater?”

“Still with Jyggalag, I hope,” said Cadwell, stumbling to his feet. “I had a bit of a run-in with Sheogorath.”

He wasn’t sure if the light flickered for a moment, or if it was just one of those things that happens sometimes when you blink.

“I see,” said Meridia. Her tone made Atmora seem warm and inviting by comparison.

Dawnbreaker had fallen out of his hands when he fell. He had just started to wobble over to retrieve it when the sword rose into the air and began to hover before him, hilt-first.

“Thanks,” he said, wearily, taking Dawnbreaker and sheathing it at his side. “It’s been a long day. Or however long it’s been.”

The orb was circling him, very slowly. “I should have expected that Sheogorath might interfere with any business involving Jyggalag. It is hardly a secret that the two do not see eye to eye.”

“It’s worse than that, apparently,” replied Cadwell. “Both Jyggalag and Sheogorath seem to think Molag Bal’s afraid of me.”

The orb froze in place. The intensity of the light seemed to grow slightly. “Molag Bal? Afraid?”

He chuckled slightly. “Sounds daft, doesn’t it? But they both seemed very serious about it. Well, as serious as Sheogorath gets.”

She moved in a sudden arc of light, stopping before his face. He couldn’t help but squint from how close she was, at this brightness. “What did they say?”

“Ah, that’s right,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “You were allies at the time, so you wouldn’t have known about it unless old Bal told you. And he definitely wouldn’t have told you.”

“ _Cadwell_.” Her voice was piercing as her light. “What did Jyggalag and Sheogorath tell you?”

“According to Jyggalag,” said Cadwell, “Molag Bal came to his Great Library and asked to see his future, and he was shown a prophecy. One where I do something to him that’s worse than death.”

Meridia shot back as quickly as she’d moved in, though it was not as smooth a movement. It reminded Cadwell of the flight of an agitated wasp.

“That seems to mean something to you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and she sounded almost uneasy.

“You don’t sound as thrilled about it as I would have expected.” He let out a small groan and rolled his neck. The vertebrae gave a few stiff pops, and he sighed. “Though that’s honestly a relief. I know you’re not a fan of free will, but the thought that all the misery in my life was _predestined_ is… well, let’s just say I’d rather not.”

There was a pause as Cadwell stretched his arms and cracked his elbows.

“It’s not a comforting thought to you,” said Meridia. It sounded like a question.

“No,” said Cadwell. “Why would it be?”

“Destined misery has an ending,” she said. “It is finite. It will not last forever.”

He turned and looked at Meridia. She was bright enough to illuminate the room thoroughly, but she also seemed so small. It felt like Cadwell cast a vast shadow in the opposite direction, a great wedge flowing across the marble tiles and blanketing the carved pillar behind him.

“I cannot imagine,” said Meridia, “how anyone can suffer, and survive that suffering, without the certainty that it will end. Without signs and portents of its ending. Even mortals can rely upon the inevitable mercy of death.”

“It almost sounds,” he said, “like you speak from experience.”

She definitely flickered. He didn’t blink this time; he stared at her hard enough to leave a stuttering afterimage in his sight.

“You have memories of the past,” she said. “The further from the present they are, the fewer of them you have, and what ones remain tend to be unclear. Correct?”

Cadwell nodded. “That’s about how memories work, yes.”

“Mine are no different,” said Meridia, “but the memories I possess are of both the past and the future.”

He tilted his head. This wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation. Meridia had a knack for time; her control over it in the Colored Rooms was well above average, even for Oblivion. And yet…

“Feel free to tell me this isn’t any of my business,” said Cadwell, with a shrug, “but how could Molag Bal deceive you if you have memories of the future?”

The light flared, though not aggressively. “Cadwell, it is not in spite of the memories that he deceived me. It is _because_ of them.”

His brow furrowed with confusion. “Sorry. You haven’t told me to shove off, so I know you’re trying, but I might need a little more explanation than that.”

Though the orb of light remained the size of a torchbug, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was somehow shrinking in on herself, a pinprick of infinite density.

“The ever-changing shapes and forms of Oblivion,” said Meridia, “mean perpetual uncertainty as to who a particular memory is about. Molag Bal was able to convince me that future memories I possessed of someone else were memories of him.”

Something shifted inside him, a roller chain sliding onto a sprocket and starting to turn as seemingly unrelated pieces of knowledge slotted into place.

“You weren’t just allies,” said Cadwell, his eyes widening.

“We were never allies,” she said, coldly. “I was deceived.”

“Sorry,” he said again. “You’re right, and that’s not quite what I meant by it, at any rate. What I did mean is—he didn’t convince you that the two of you would someday have some momentary alignment of goals.” He folded his hands loosely in front of himself. “He lied to gain access to something more vulnerable than that.”

The pause before Meridia responded was only a few seconds, but it seemed to stretch into infinite space.

“Yes,” she finally said. “That is a correct assessment.”

Cadwell felt a bolt of searing hatred burn through him, thoroughly surprising in its intensity. It was the kind of thing that occasionally burst out of his soul into the rest of him, and he would fumble around in mild desperation to put it out before it could manage to set everything around him on fire.

He didn’t bother to try to put it out this time.

“You didn’t deserve that,” he said.

“I did not,” said Meridia. “Yet once the mistake is made, its consequences cannot be taken back. Sheogorath is proof enough of that.”

“That’s not just on you,” said Cadwell. “That’s on everyone else, too.”

“It was an example,” replied Meridia. “There are others I would rather not name.”

Between this and the apology she’d requested he deliver to Jyggalag—

“Ah, the apology,” he said, with a wince of realization. “I’m sorry. I was so distracted by Jyggalag knowing who I was and why that it clean slipped my mind.”

“Given the circumstances,” she said, “it’s more than understandable.”

“I should get going, then,” said Cadwell, reaching up to pat the pot on his head. “I wouldn’t want to be remiss in my d—”

He stopped as he felt his hand connect with his head. He ran his fingertips through his hair.

The pot was gone. He was certain he’d been wearing it when he arrived. Cadwell glanced down at the floor, eyes searching for the shattered tile that should have occurred where a cast-iron pot landed at high velocity.

“There is no need to return right away,” said Meridia, calmly. “It would be unwise to send you back out so soon after escaping Sheogorath’s grasp.”

“I shouldn’t abandon Raksha to the whims of an unfamiliar Daedric Prince, either,” said Cadwell, starting to pace the floor in the search for his pot.

“Cord-Eater is more than capable of handling the situation,” she replied. “But if you are that concerned about it, it is a trivial matter to ensure your local time passes far faster than the time outside it.”

“The inverse of Umaril, then,” he said, bending to look behind an ornate urn. Without looking at her directly, he could see the color of the room shift subtly—the light growing colder, nearly moonlight in temperature.

“I was not aware you knew that much,” she said, cautiously.

“It seemed fairly obvious to me,” said Cadwell, sighing and turning to look back at her over his shoulder. “But in the end, it didn’t matter if I knew or not. Whatever reason you must have had to make your champion’s regeneration last nearly four thousand years, it’s not really my business, is it? Whatever it was, it’s between you and Umaril, so I should keep my nose out of it.”

With that, he turned back and resumed searching the corners and crevices.

“You are a strange one, Cadwell,” said Meridia.

“Why? Because I mind my own business?” Or perhaps because he was wasting time still looking for his pot when he had more than a few spares back at the hovel, one short portal to Coldharbour away.

“Because you leave of your own free will,” she said, “and then, unfathomably, you choose to come back.”

He stared over his shoulder at her for a moment before turning back to the urn. Absurd as it was, he realized that _yes_ , a Daedric Prince _had_ , in fact, been reduced to stealing a cast-iron pot off an old fool's head, instead of commanding him to remain, or blocking his ability to leave. It mattered that he _could_ leave but _chose_ to stay, even if it was for the sake of a twenty septim pot.

The idea had never occurred to him before.

“To tell the truth, I am dead knackered,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “But I’d rather not have a kip in Umaril's chambers, if it's all right by you.”

There something to the light for an instant that Cadwell took as a sigh of relief.

☙

The Khajiit had a number of myths in their time that touched on things men and mer left unexamined. They were not necessarily true in the sense of literal facts, but preserved something true nevertheless.

Only the Khajiit spoke of Magnus as blind. Only the Khajiit spoke of how he had love for only himself and his works. Only the Khajiit spoke of Merid-Nunda as the child that the blind god of magic had forged from aether as an act of pure will, simply because he could—light without love, intellect without wisdom, knowledge without purpose.

They also said she was cold and unfeeling. Perhaps it looked that way on the outside. In reality, if that had been true, she would have remained in Aetherius at her father's side forever, as indifferent and untouchable as he was.

Instead, she was born with the hook in her mouth, waiting for the line to pull taut.

In spite of his unparalleled skill, her father had not succeeded in making a being as perfect as himself. She was flawed, cursed with weakness, burning with useless desires that the sun could not fathom, and it was no surprise that she fell. It was only a matter of time before she was, quite literally, found wanting.

She remembered a Daedric Prince in her future. Perhaps more than one? It was hard to say, but she knew, long before she left—her life would be lived in Oblivion.

At the time, she was naïve enough to find comfort in that. The long passage of time had not yet shown her the pain she would have no choice but to endure as she passed through.

 _It is painful right now, but it will be better,_ she kept telling herself. _These hopes are the way forward, and they will not be in vain._

The number of times she could remember telling herself that Molag Bal _would change_ shuddered through her on a regular basis.

By the time she had the love of the Ayleids whose home would one day be the Hollow City, she knew even without memories that it would not last. Love was conditional. As long as she did great things for them, they would praise and adore her. The instant she did something for herself, that praise would cease.

As she drew upon the Lights and stabbed the city through Bal's own portal—a knife into his heart—she could already hear the rage of the survivors, scattered across Coldharbour by its defenses. _We trusted you, and you betrayed us._

She stood on the walls of the empty city, staring out across the wastes of Coldharbour, wondering what a victory without pain was even like. Was it like this for Azura? Mephala? Boethiah? Their followers never seemed to hold these secret entitlements. She tried to imagine a Boethiah worshipper behaving like this when his patron seized the perfect moment; the bitterness overflowed, and came out as mirthless laughter.

In the distance, across a great chasm, she could see a man standing at its edge. He stared back across at the city—perhaps he had been watching the whole time. His eyes were the cloudy white of a soul shriven, but his face did not reveal even a hint of fear.

She remembered him. His name was Cadwell. He was, or would be, a knight. Molag Bal could not contain him. His hand rested on the hilt of a sword that had already cleaved Dremora in two, that would be drawn again soon in the defense of the scattered city residents. He would not be able to save all of them, but he was not setting out to save all of them—saving some was better than saving none, and no one was expecting him to do anything at all, let alone the impossible.

They would be cursing her name and praising his, and he would simply shrug, telling them something absurd that mortals did not say to each other. Then he would leave.

She knew, somehow, that the reason he left was a keen awareness of the same thing she had learned: the love only lasts as long as the lack of disappointment. Leaving while the expectations are still low cuts it short. It prevents the bulk of the pain.

This was a great deal more than she usually knew at a first glance.

Meridia stared back at Cadwell across the chasm. A soul shriven could not and would not have sharp enough eyesight to make eye contact at this distance, and yet it seemed like he met her gaze.

Who was this Cadwell to her? What was their connection?

The answer from the well of memory was as disturbing as it was unusually direct—a memory of a voice she knew was his, cheerfully declaring, “for what is a knight without a lady love to protect?”

Clearly, even after all this time, she was still carrying around pointless naïveté.

☙

The room where Meridia had spoken with them before was mostly in the same condition they’d left it in. The sky seemed a little darker. The curtains remained still, the breeze absent. It had already been quiet, and now it was soundless enough to hear his own breath.

Meridia made so much more of an effort than she had a reputation for, he noted, as he unstrapped the baking sheets from his chest and set them down on the tea table.

Soul shriven had no need to eat, or to sleep, or to do most of the things that mortals needed to stay alive. Yet Cadwell had probably more implements of scullery drudgery than swords, and not merely to use as armor. He always had a bed roll, and if anything happened to it, he dropped everything to repair or replace it. It was a completely unnecessary luxury, but it was also _important_.

Coldharbour had no clear day and night, so it was hard to say if he was using his bed roll daily or not, but he did unquestionably spend at least a third of his life in or on it. So many hours had been spent slumped against a heap of laundry on top of his bed roll, noodling on the lute. Practice was usually less about playing a definite melody and more about exploring and testing the way the lute felt in his hands, the sounds the strings made in response to his fingers and the various ways he could guide those sounds in one direction or another. Even very early on, when he had no idea what he was doing and it almost certainly sounded like a broken torture device, the lute still banished the silence and held memory at bay.

His fingers itched a little at its absence.

He sat on the sofa and kicked his boots off. A few hundred years ago this would have earned a loud cry of annoyance from Honor, who was of the adamant opinion that this amounted to a prison break. The last time Raksha witnessed this, he took one look at his stained and weathered linen footwraps, and said, “You need socks.” Then he promptly went out and bought him a pair.

Cadwell was not exactly sure when it graduated from that first pragmatic act to a regular event, but ever since then, he knew it was a new year in Tamriel when he would return home to find a neatly wrapped package in his hovel, addressed to him in Raksha’s flowing hand. The package always contained socks—sometimes bright and colorful, sometimes elaborately patterned, sometimes knit with intricate lattices and cables, but always mid-calf or higher.

Honor had deemed this to be an acceptable solution to the problem, and now tended to run off with one of his boots to hide it in a bush somewhere instead.

He sighed and stretched out on the sofa. Even with reassurance from Meridia that mere seconds would pass while he rested, he wished he could know with certainty that they were both doing fine.

Meridia was right, of course, when she said that Raksha was more than capable. When they’d first met in Coldharbour, Raksha’s skill in Mysticism had been limited to absorption and soul trapping, but by the time the third era rolled around, he was practically an old hand at Psijic portals. Not nearly as fast with them, of course, and from Cadwell’s perspective, all mages seemed to get remarkably winded from the simplest of unseen portals, but it meant Raksha was never trapped without an escape, and that was enough.

As Cadwell laid on the sofa, he remembered a time before that was the case.

He’d been in the Colored Rooms, then, and he had to be grateful for that. If he’d been in Coldharbour when he felt the sudden shiver—he would have had no idea what it was, and shrugged it off as if it was nothing. Even in the Colored Rooms, he nearly did so anyway, but he was at Meridia’s side. There must have been some sign on his face, or perhaps in his posture, because she turned to him and asked, “Is something the matter, Cadwell?”

“I’m not sure,” he had answered, which was the truth, and cracked a smile at her. “I suppose someone’s walking over my grave. Very rude of them, honestly.”

“ _Cadwell,_ ” said Meridia. It was clear from her tone that she wanted elaboration, not cheerful deflection.

“It was just a strong feeling,” he replied. “It felt—slippery? But also tingly. It tingles where it slips.” He shook his head. “See, that doesn’t even make any sense, that’s just—” He paused as a second instance occurred, shivering as it passed.

Meridia stared at him for a moment, her expression seeming even more serious than it usually did.

“Aside from the tingling,” she said, “would you say that it feels as though someone is trying to touch you, but cannot maintain a hold?”

“I’m not sure if I would—” A third shiver went through him, and he paused after it passed. “Actually, yes. A bit.”

She leaned closer, and for a moment, it seemed almost like a protective gesture. “Cadwell, that’s a failed summoning.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “What, like a conjurer?”

“Soul shriven are as much vestige and morphotype as any Daedra,” said Meridia. “The same principles apply to them as anyone else. The lack of summoned soul shriven is due to a lack of interest, not a greater amount of difficulty.”

“Fair enough,” said Cadwell, “but someone out there clearly does have an interest, and—” Another shiver hit him, far shorter and weaker than the ones that went before.

Meridia straightened her back, lifting her chin and seeming to stare a point somewhere above his head. “It takes a great deal more skill to summon a specific individual rather than a random individual of a given type. Power also comes into it. You are at least on the same level as a Dremora kynreeve, but it’s possible your strength is great enough to require a ritual with multiple summoners.”

It was only a few months after Raksha had sent Molag Bal to the Void, so it was a time when Cadwell’s memories of the Merethic era had faded to a nagging feeling here and there. What Meridia said had seemed absurd at the time, but in hindsight, she was absolutely right. He was attuned to the Lunar Lattice, to the movement of the moons and their power. Even with a ritual, it probably wasn’t even possible to summon him without waiting for a lunar eclipse.

Cadwell was sure Meridia knew that part, too.

“So, just to be sure I have this right,” he had said, “Someone’s specifically trying to summon _me_ , in particular. They’re failing because they don’t have the power to make it happen, and whoever it is, they’re stubborn enough to just keep trying anyway and—”

He paused as the tiniest quiver went through him, almost a hiccup. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been consciously paying attention. Meridia reached out with one hand, and seemed to grasp something invisible above his head.

“A pocket realm of the Fields of Regret,” she said, her hand pulling gently at the air. “That’s where he is.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Clavicus Vile’s realm? Can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure, honestly. And who’s this ‘he’?”

“Cord-Eater,” said Meridia, grimly.

A bolt of terror shot through his marrow as the pieces fell into place. Before Cadwell had even opened his mouth, she had raised her other hand, summoning a portal with a flick of her wrist.

“Go,” she said, “and be ready for anything. I am not familiar with this particular pocket of the Fields.”

Cadwell nodded to her as he drew and readied his sword, and leapt into the portal, Honor following close behind.

Looking back on it now, he wished he had thanked Meridia before he left. She was probably more than aware he had a few other things on his mind, but still.

He arrived in the main chamber of an underground shrine, all stone arches and copper urns. The entrance to the chamber had long been sealed by a cave-in, but past a patch of grass and wild carrot flowers, he found a short flight of stairs. Honor practically flew up them, screeching at Cadwell to hurry. There, on a platform in the middle of the chamber, stood a bronze statue of a masked skaafin with a large wolfhound. Beneath the statue, Honor had found Raksha.

It was the first time Cadwell had seen Raksha since Coldharbour, and he was definitely the worse for wear. The Khajiit mage was bent low, ragged, one knee to the ground as he gripped a strange brass staff with both hands. It looked like the staff and tenacity alone were keeping him upright. A steel Telvanni helmet was discarded on the floor next to him, along with a frankly disturbing number of empty potion bottles.

“Azurah’s mercy,” said Raksha, his mouth curling into a wry smile as Honor stood next to him and yelled. “Cadwell, you are—the phrase is ‘a sight for sore eyes,’ is it not?”

“A sight to make your eyes sore, certainly,” replied Cadwell, sheathing his sword. He rushed to Raksha's side and slipped a hand under his arm to help him up. “Good to see you, too, old friend. What’s all this?”

“The short version,” he said, ears twitching as he spoke, “is that Clavicus Vile did not take well to Raksha ‘disciplining’ his favorite pet.”

Cadwell had to grin at this. “You’ve certainly been busy, haven’t you?” Raksha was even more unsteady than he’d appeared at first glance; Cadwell brought his shoulder up under the Khajiit’s arm to give him something more sturdy to lean on. “From Molag Bal to Clavicus Vile. I’m sure there’s a story in that.”

“This one wishes there was time to explain properly, but there is not.” He weakly gestured to the staff in his hand. “This is Sunna’rah, a blessed staff of Sotha Sil of the Tribunal.”

“Quite the upgrade,” said Cadwell, nodding.

“Sadly, it is not this one’s to keep,” said Raksha. “It currently contains the bulk of Vivec’s divine power, and he will die if it is not returned. Vile does not truly have the means to trap this one, for he cannot stop Khajiit from reforming in Coldharbour, but—” He paused for a moment, eyes narrowed in irritation. “The Prince of Bargains also knows nothing else could come with him to the Void.”

“Ah, and so you thought of an old knight who could come to your rescue. Or the staff’s rescue, as it were.” He chuckled lightly. “Say no more, friend. You need a portal to Vivec City, then?”

“Yes, and straight to the palace, if possible.” One ear tilted hard with worry. “Baar Dau was hanging precariously low last time this one was there. He cannot be sure what state the streets may be in.”

It was surprisingly easy to punch through to Tamriel—compared to Coldharbour, the Fields of Regret had very simple defenses that took only a bit of brute force to get past. Cadwell would have expected it to be the other way around, but then again, the defenses were unlikely to be the direct work of either Prince. Molag Bal was just lucky enough to have the better architect.

He wrapped an arm about Raksha’s waist as the portal opened, holding him up and effectively walking for the both of them as he approached it and stepped through into Vivec City.

The sky was a dark grey, almost black with ash. The stairs of the palace ziggurat had an unobstructed view of Red Mountain to the north, a great column of black clouds rising from a malevolent glow. To say Baar Dau was “precariously low” was overly generous; the moonlet was closer to the palace than Cadwell’s hovel was to the Hollow City. Through the sheets of falling ash, he could see looters hopping construction scaffolds, and a terrified mass of Dunmer citizens tried to shove their way through to the city docks, their only path pressing them into and around a single canton far too small to handle such a crowd.

The pair of Buoyant Armigers guarding the palace entrance rushed forward, swords drawn, and Raksha slammed Sunna’rah down between them. In his state at the time, it had no force, but the staff sparked visibly with magic, and even an armiger had to step back with surprise.

“This is no time for _misunderstandings_ ,” he spat, throwing himself off Cadwell’s shoulder to put his full weight on Sunna’rah. “This one will return to Vivec what belongs to Vivec, and you will either help him do so or _get out of the way_.”

It wasn’t the most powerful threat Cadwell had seen Raksha issue. He had managed much more technically impressive feats in Coldharbour. But _this_ —scolding a pair of overzealous armigers while barely able to stand without aid—it struck him, then, that this was Raksha at his best.

The Buoyant Armigers profusely apologized—“My deepest apologies, sera,” one said, “I didn’t recognize you”—and began to rush him inside. Cadwell started to follow, then hesitated, looking back at the portal. He needed to close it, but he hadn’t seen Honor come through yet—

As if to answer his thoughts, a steel Telvanni helmet came flying through, hitting him on the pot hard enough to clang loudly. He fumbled and caught it after it bounced off, as Honor emerged with a small but earnest roar of disappointment.

“All right, yes, we _did_ almost leave behind a rare enchanted helmet,” said Cadwell, shaking his head as he closed the portal behind her. “But you shouldn’t make me worry like that!”

Honor huffed and turned her tail on him. This was going to be a point of disagreement for A While.

By the time they both slipped inside the palace, it was clear he was catching the tail end of the fireworks. Cadwell stopped and stood just inside the open door to Vivec’s chambers as the Living God rose from his bed into the air. Raksha collapsed down on both knees, Sunna’rah clattering to the floor as it slipped from his hands. A single gesture of Vivec’s left hand stopped him from falling further. A second gesture of his right hand followed shortly—a flowing movement, like the curling smoke of burning incense—and Cadwell watched with amazement as Raksha’s exhaustion evaporated. In mere seconds, he was as sturdy as he ever was.

Cadwell stayed at the edges of everything after that point. He really had no idea who any of these people were—well, not literally. He knew who Vivec was, he recognized temple vestments, and he could tell who was an armiger or an ordinator, though not necessarily which one was which, but he hadn’t met and spoken with any of these people before. They didn’t know him and he didn’t know them. They had Raksha in common, and that was about it. Even in the best of contexts, that tended to be a bit awkward, and he honestly hadn’t done very much at all. One portal: that was his contribution to saving Vvardenfell.

He and Honor stuck around for a few days while everything settled down and returned to normal. It didn’t take very long with Vivec back up and about, and even if it had, it would have been worth it to catch up with Raksha over tea. Hearing Raksha’s “proper” tale of the past several months was almost worth the price of admission by itself—mystery and intrigue, pride and arrogance, impersonation and betrayal, but the Hero Triumphs In The End—and he couldn’t help but wish he’d been there to see it.

On some level, not particularly far down, he wanted to come up with an excuse to never leave, to always be there to see it. Or even just to be there for the mundane day-to-day—the cups of tea, the casual musings over lunch, the “did this one ever tell you about the time that he—” and “oh, that reminds me of the time that I—”, with Honor curled up under the bench and falling asleep.

In the end, he went back to the Colored Rooms, and relayed to Meridia what had happened. She had found Clavicus Vile’s actions and goals interesting, but never elaborated on why. He didn’t need to know, he had supposed, and that was fair enough.

Cadwell stretched out across the couch and looked down at the socks on his feet, a saffron yellow pair made of absurdly soft goat wool. Possibly some rabbit in there, too.

It was strange how he could feel both lucky and sad at the same time. He felt lucky, because no matter what happened, even when they were so busy that centuries passed without seeing each other, they’d still managed to remain friends for a thousand years. Small change for Daedra and soul shriven, but nothing to sniff at, either.

In spite of that, he was still selfish enough to not be satisfied with the shape of things. He had a secret greediness, kept stashed away in his soul with all the other ugly parts he never let out.

That was his own damn fault, and no one else’s.

☙

“I would have one more word with you, Raksha Cord-Eater, if I may.”

“Of course,” Raksha had replied, nodding in acknowledgement. He approached Vivec again as the crowd began to disperse from the impromptu ceremony.

“The friendship of a god need not consist of purely symbolic gestures,” said the Warrior-Poet. “If there is a favor you would wish to receive—within reason, of course—merely say the word and it shall be granted.”

Raksha’s hand went to his chin in thought. If he had been asked this not even two years earlier—before Mannimarco sacrificed him, before he woke up a soul shriven in Coldharbour—it would have been a fast and simple response. He would have asked for power. The power of the Tribunal, a power that could make mortals rise to godhood: even a small fraction of this would likely overcome his weaknesses, would make his abilities surpass the achievements most mages only managed after a lifetime of practice and study. He would be able to go home to his father, and stand before him, saying, “Look at your son. Behold what he has accomplished. Gods and kings know his name and speak of him with affection and gratitude. Is he still such a disappointment?”

Yet power did not have much appeal, now. Chodala’s blind pursuit of power was what killed him and nearly killed Vivec, and it was not power, in the end, that helped him save Vivec’s life.

Without meaning to, Raksha had turned back to look at Cadwell. He was leaning against the wall of the canton, looking down at Honor by his feet. They were having some kind of conversation—well, the usual kind of one-sided one. Cadwell’s arms were crossed and he wagged a finger at Honor, scolding her, but he was smiling warmly at the same time.

“This one has no need of a divine favor at this time,” said Raksha, turning back to Vivec. “Perhaps it can be considered a promise of future aid, instead. Clavicus Vile has still found his way to the Clockwork City, after all, and it seems his motives are beyond those of a mere tourist.”

“One crisis ends and another begins,” mused Vivec. “Such is life on this rock we call Nirn.” His eyes shifted away from Raksha’s face, off to one side, and the Khajiit realized that he was now looking at Cadwell, too.

“He’s a friend,” said Raksha, quickly. “We met in Coldharbour, and he helped stop the Planemeld.”

“A friend, you say,” replied the god, and he turned his gaze back to the Khajiit’s face. He was still smiling, though the golden side of his mouth was raised higher than the other, and his eyes squinted with an indecipherable amusement.

These were eyes like a spear, Raksha thought, though if he had been asked to explain, he wouldn’t be able to put it clearly into words. They were not piercing. There was no sharpness to them. The light glistened off of them like softly polished ruby cabochons. And yet, on some level, it was as if this simple rising of his lower eyelids with mirth had managed to skewer through something unseen. Left it bleeding, suspended on a pike.

At the time, Raksha had a room at the Abbey of St. Delyn, and he considered inviting Cadwell back to it—for conversation in private, of course. For a drink or two to successfully saving the life of a living god. He had a bottle of Cyrodilic brandy he’d specifically saved because it had seemed like something Cadwell would enjoy.

He would invite him in, and as he closed the door behind them, Cadwell would consider the banners of crescent moons on the walls and admire the lush Khajiiti rug beneath their feet.

“You’ve managed a bit of Elsweyr away from home, here, haven’t you?” he’d ask, thumbs tucked into the loops of his belt. “Very impressive. Hope the shipping didn’t cost you too dearly.”

“Surprisingly, no,” Raksha would reply. “Somehow there’s enough demand for it that House Hlaalu have found a way to cut most of the costs. Though this one appreciates not being close enough to their business to know exactly how.”

“That’s surprising,” Cadwell would say, stroking his beard. “Not that everyone’s the same, mind you, but word has it that Morrowind isn’t the kindest place for cats and lizards.”

He might not say “cats and lizards”. He might say “Khajiit and Argonians”. Still, he did have a knack for saying things that out of someone else’s mouth would be patronizing, but out of his mouth, it was genuinely affectionate.

He would never tell anyone, least of all Cadwell, but Raksha actually very much enjoys it when he calls him “cat”.

“The kindness of Dunmer varies from person to person and place to place,” Raksha would say with a shrug. “Vivec City might be better than Mournhold in many ways. Sadrith Mora is another matter.”

Cadwell would nod seriously at this. “Fair enough. No one in particular has been giving you a hard time, have they?” There might be something like a tiny, almost imperceptible edge to his voice, that in someone else might sound like asking for names to put on the hit list.

“No, no one in particular,” he would say, as he set out a pair of glasses and opened the bottle of brandy. A small lie, but it wasn’t something Cadwell needed to worry about. “Only Telvanni being Telvanni, and that might well be their undoing, soon enough.”

“Ah, yes,” Cadwell would say, “they’re the ones who wouldn’t agree to all the terms of the Pact, aren’t they? So they aren’t technically part of it.”

“Beyond even that,” Raksha would reply. “House Telvanni does not care about the Ruby Throne, but they cannot help but care about their own relevancy in the future.” A pause to hum as he poured the two glasses. “A month or two ago, this one met quite a charming young Argonian mage who is—how does the phrase go? Giving them ‘a run for their money’?”

“Sounds about right,” he would say in response. “Bit of an odd one, if you really think about it. Where are they keeping it that they have to go running for it, anyway?”

“The bank,” replied Raksha, “which means it all loops back to House Hlaalu in the end.”

He would turn to hand Cadwell his glass. He would not be as careful as he could be, and their hands would brush against each other, uncoordinated and awkward. They would both be wearing gloves, but it would still send a shiver through Raksha, and he would suddenly find himself keenly aware of every individual strand of his fur.

“So, this charming young Argonian,” Cadwell would say, pausing to take a sip of his brandy. “Is this associate of yours a young man? A young woman?”

“A young woman,” Raksha would say, nodding. “A former slave. This one helped her bargain her way to freedom, and then to a position as a House Telvanni retainer.”

“Ah, I see.” He would be looking at his glass, swirling the liquid inside into a vortex. “She must be very grateful, then.”

Raksha would take a sip of his own glass, and as he felt the singe of the brandy on his tongue, he would find himself looking Cadwell up and down, examining his stance for some insight into his thought process.

“She is,” he would say, “but right now, her gratitude is a bit tempered by grief for her mate.” Cadwell’s eyes would widen, and Raksha would have to lift a hand in a reassuring gesture. “Nothing fatal, this one assures you. Her ambitions aim higher than the mightiest Telvanni towers, but her mate was another slave who deeply missed his homeland; he did not wish to remain in Morrowind another moment. There could be no compromise.”

“So they had to part ways,” Cadwell would say. There would be a tinge of sadness to his eyes—perhaps not sadness, perhaps something similar but not the same. There would be something there and Raksha would find himself wondering what it was. “It’s a terrible shame, but sometimes that’s how it is. Sometimes people just aren’t compatible. Or they would be, but it just doesn’t happen, and it’s not even anyone’s fault that it doesn’t happen.”

“Are you saying it’s fate?” Raksha would ask.

“Maybe it’s fate,” Cadwell would reply. “After all, there was a prophecy about you in an Elder Scroll somewhere, wasn’t there? If anyone could read them all without going blind, could be that everything about everyone is in there, start to finish.”

“That is possible, yes,” he would concede. He would take another sip of brandy. “But you don’t believe that.”

He’d have caught Cadwell mid-sip, and the older soul shriven would end up chuckling into his own glass. “Well, there goes a fine career as a devil’s advocate.”

“So it goes,” Raksha would say. “You’re doing a much better job as a dashing hero, at any rate.”

“Beg pardon,” Cadwell would say, “but _you’re_ the dashing hero. _I’m_ the gallant knight.”

“Oh?” He would feel a wry smile rising up, mischief blooming in him like a flower with teeth, and he would move closer. “What’s the difference, then?”

“Chivalry,” would be Cadwell’s reply. It would be very matter-of-fact, and he would follow the statement with a sip of brandy.

“Yes,” Raksha would say, almost at Cadwell’s shoulder, “but what _is_ chivalry? How is it different from heroism?”

“Well,” Cadwell would say, and his brow would furrow as he lifted his gaze in thought. “Let’s see. A knight is brave, fair, generous—”

“So is a hero.”

“—a protector of the vulnerable and the innocent, champion of good against evil—”

“The hero is, too.”

Here Cadwell would have to pause, and for a moment, he would look a bit confused. “Well, then. I suppose it’s his chivalrous devotion to his lady.”

“A hero may also love a lady,” Raksha would say.

“Ah, but a knight’s love for his lady is _different_ ,” Cadwell would say, and this time with a puff of pride. “It’s pure of heart, unselfish and undemanding. A love that uplifts the spirit and encourages the knight to achieve ever greater heights of valor and honor.”

Raksha would be close enough at this point for his tail to brush up against Cadwell’s leg. “Are you saying the hero’s love is impure?”

“Well, no, not quite—”

“Selfish and demanding?”

Cadwell would suddenly seem compelled to take a very long sip of his brandy.

“Apologies if this one has missed something,” Raksha would continue, “but it sounds like the difference between the hero and the knight is that the hero _fucks_.”

Cadwell would somehow, miraculously, not spew brandy everywhere, but he will certainly have gotten some up his nose.

“Are you all right?” he would ask, as Cadwell sputtered and nodded assent. “That was unwise on this one’s part. He should have waited for you to finish.” Before Cadwell would be able to respond, he would have taken his glass from him and handed his own to him in its place.

As Raksha sets the spewed glass down on a side table, Cadwell would say, “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but… you’re not quite _wrong_ , either.”

Raksha would turn and look at him in amazement, because usually whenever the topic of conversation turned to sex, he would quickly find a way to change the subject.

“I mean,” he would continue, staring into his new glass, “you’re right that these words are just ways of dancing around the idea, the whole concept that even if you want to—maybe _especially_ if you want to—you just _don’t_.”

“Why?” Raksha would ask.

“Because it’s safer that way,” Cadwell would reply.

There would be a moment of brief confusion while Raksha tried to figure out if Cadwell meant it was safer for the lady or the knight.

“Perhaps it is just cultural difference,” he would say, “but to this one’s ears, that sounds like unnecessary suffering.”

“It can be painful,” he would reply, “but it’s pain that makes you a better person. I don’t know how better to explain it than that.”

“Explained well or not, this one must disagree.” He would be approaching Cadwell again, though there would be no mischief in it this time. “Raksha does not believe that suffering makes a person better. The choices one makes in response to suffering, perhaps, but not suffering itself.”

Cadwell would likely continue to stare at his brandy without drinking any more of it, but it was also possible that he might look up and meet Raksha’s gaze without speaking a word.

“It is true,” Raksha would continue, regardless, “that love uplifts the spirit, that it can be a drive to be better than we otherwise would be. It does not have to be a fragile, untouchable thing to do this. Love can exist in the air and on the ground, without having to surrender one or the other.”

If Cadwell was looking him in the eye, he might have to wait until his gaze had dropped back down again. The truth was, this would be the terrifying part. This would be the part capable of destroying everything. Cadwell would be right in that sense, that it is safer not to do anything at all.

Still. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

He would slip his arms loosely over Cadwell’s shoulders, coming in close enough to brush whiskers against his moustache, and to his surprised expression, he would say:

“Of course, this one is a hero, not a knight.”

And he would wait for him to respond.

There were two ways this could likely go. One would be that Cadwell would look mortified, shove his arms away and pull back, awkwardly excusing himself from the room. The wait would be, in part, to give him the room to do this. It would be excruciating. It would confirm nearly every second of doubt. It would also be his right.

The other possibility, the hoped-for possibility, would be that Cadwell would close the gap and kiss him.

At this point, the branches of possibility become overwhelming in numbers. It might be a soft, shy kiss, lips barely brushing against his mouth, and he would have to gently press back into him to confirm that yes, this is happening, this is real.

It might be a more confident kiss, his arms wrapping about Raksha’s waist, but still careful, still modest, still dignified and carefully holding the glass of brandy in one hand until he can set it down somewhere.

And then there is the possibility of the dam breaking, of everything that has been held in the reservoir rushing forward in a sudden flood.

Cadwell would press their bodies together as tightly as his arms can manage, trembling hands grasping at Raksha’s shoulder blades through his robes. The brandy will be spilled and the glass will have fallen to the rug and it will be fine, it’s a thick rug, it’s unlikely to break.

Raksha would still be able to taste the brandy on Cadwell’s tongue as he starts to pull him over to the bed. They might not make it to the bed—the other advantage of a thick rug.

“Are you all right?” asked Cadwell.

Raksha started for a moment, almost spilling his tea.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” His face was perched in both hands, with a curious expression. “You just seemed to be a bit lost in thought, I suppose.”

Lost in thought. Yes. That was one way to put it.

“It’s fine,” said the Khajiit, taking a sip of his tea. It had gone cold; he resisted making a face. He was a Khajiit in St. Delyn’s Plaza. As cosmopolitan as Vivec City was compared to the rest of Vvardenfell, everyone would notice, and everyone would Talk.

“Well, then,” said Cadwell, cheerfully. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“This one was just thinking,” he replied, “that he will owe you a drink for this.”

Raksha would eventually give the unopened bottle of brandy to another mage as a host gift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this was a chapter where I did at least two things I thought I'd never do in this fic: I figured Vivec would be talked about but never actually show up, and I figured Meridia would never get a POV scene. These are also both things I'm glad I did.
> 
> (No dislike/obliteration of Barilzar intended by his absence. I mean, even he was surprised "zap a statue with Vivectricity to escape" actually worked, so maybe think of this as the timeline where it unfortunately does _not_.)


	7. Ambivalent Image

The trip from Wrothgar to Elsweyr was a long one. Traveling across Cyrodiil at all during the Three Banners War promised enough of a hassle that Raksha thought better of it. He went south to Bangkorai instead, booking passage on a ship from Evermore to Betnikh, then to Stros M'Kai, Shimmerene, Vulkhel Guard, Khenarthi's Roost, and finally Senchal, where he caught the first caravan heading north to Rimmen.

Raksha saved every invoice and bill of sale, and to his credit, Abnur Tharn did not so much as blink an eye when he arrived in Riverhold and handed him the pile. His promise to cover his travel costs was, indeed, completely sincere.

The courier he’d sent, Raksha remembered, was a fiercely scarred Breton who had taken the direct overland route through the heart of Cyrodiil and western Skyrim. This was both mad and terrifyingly impressive. Certainly a name to remember, this Anais Davaux.

In any case, there were dragons involved. Tharn had been seeking a legendary weapon in the Halls of Colossus, he explained, which turned out to be a group of dragons that had been sealed away in antiquity. And then he accidentally set them free. Of course.

“I was formulating a spell to track the dragons,” Tharn told him, “when I noticed several surges of arcane energy not far from here.”

Raksha hummed, his hand at his chin. “You think these surges have something to do with the dragons, then?”

Tharn shook his head. “Hard to say with certainty, but I don’t believe so. They remind me of Sir Cadwell—”

His ears shot upright and his tail flew from one side to the other before he was able to catch himself and force it to remain still. Abnur Tharn did not fail to notice this.

“Ah, it seems you remember him,” he said, wryly. “Perhaps even fondly.”

“Cadwell is a worthy ally,” replied Raksha, trying to keep his expression stern and controlled. “If he is here, you should count it as a stroke of good fortune. His skills in a time like this are not to be underestimated. This one is not exaggerating when he says that the whole of Morrowind may well owe him their lives.”

Tharn raised an eyebrow. “The whole of Morrowind? That’s an unusual boast for him.”

“It is not a boast he makes at all,” said Raksha. “He refuses to accept any credit for his role in—” He paused and held his hand before his mouth, thinking through his options. “A delicate matter of the Tribunal, let’s say.”

“Well, you have been busy, haven’t you?” The corners of his mouth curled up slightly, almost imperceptibly. “To be fair, I do know more of this ‘delicate matter’ than perhaps it may seem, though I suspect you already know that much; otherwise you would never even speak of it. There are always eyes and ears of the Empire in Morrowind, and there always will be.”

“Raksha would expect no less of a Tharn,” he replied, “and you, he thinks, would expect no less of him.”

The battlemage nodded back in solemn acknowledgement.

Abnur Tharn gave him a map marked with a number of locations that seemed to be where the surges had occurred. At one, he found the corpses of a squad of Euraxian soldiers. The commander was still carrying a written copy of his orders—to investigate the very same surges, it seemed. Euraxia and and her court necromancer had picked up on them, too. It was intriguing, but ultimately not very helpful.

At another site that Tharn had indicated, he found a Dagi and an Alfiq hovering in curiosity around a dead ogrim like ja’khajiit around an exotic dog. When questioned, they had nothing useful to report, but that was fine. The ogrim itself was evidence enough. Even after three years, Raksha would know a Daedra of Coldharbour anywhere.

At the third site, he ran into Honor.

The bantam guar let out a chirrup of recognition and began to scurry off, and Raksha broke into a completely undignified run after her—which, he realized as soon as he’d started, was probably the point. Honor had him scrambling up and down boulders and through crevices and he was almost certain this was solely to mess with him, because she was not taking a direct route to any given destination, and she was skittering past obvious paths she could take that he could not.

She did, at least, eventually lead him to Cadwell. But only after he had been running for several minutes straight and had to stop to catch his breath. Even Molag Bal couldn’t hold a candle to that one, sometimes.

It was a grave site tucked between some outcroppings of rock in the savannah. Cadwell had a shovel in his hands and stood waist deep in a large hole dug before a broken gravestone. He bent down to continue digging and did not seem to notice Raksha approaching. Honor let out a loud squeal, which got him to look up, and he beamed at the sight of the Khajiit behind her.

“Raksha!” he cried, the very definition of high spirits. “It’s so good to see you again, old chum! Have you come to pay your respects, too?”

“Not quite,” said Raksha. He stopped and stood at the edge of the hole, peering down into it at the soul shriven’s handiwork. “Khajiit must confess, this is unexpected. He would never have taken you for a grave robber, Cadwell.”

“Would never even dream of it,” said Cadwell, his smile unshaken. “Though apparently I _would_ dream of this grave, for some reason.”

He tilted his head. “You dreamed of this place? This one thought soul shriven didn’t sleep.”

Cadwell wagged a finger at him. “I didn’t say anything about sleep! You can dream without sleeping, you know. Happens all the time.”

Raksha rubbed his chin in thought, then circled around the hole to get a better look at the gravestone. It was a very old style, though it seemed as though it had been broken only recently: the edges on the pieces were still sharp, without any weathering from age.

The gravestone read, in ancient Ta’agra:

> Here Lies the Head of the Betrayer  
>  Whose Name Has Been Stricken from History  
>  May the Pieces of His Dismembered Body Remain Hidden  
>  Until Jone and Jode Fall from the Sky

“The Betrayer, eh?” Cadwell clicked his tongue in disapproval. “Sounds like a dastardly chap, doesn’t he? I wonder if I ever met him.”

Raksha stared at him. “You can read that?”

“Of course I can,” he said, leaning on his shovel. “Why shouldn’t I?”

The Khajiit opened his mouth to say something, then paused. He brought one hand up to his chin and rubbed it in thought.

“Aside from the accent,” he said, pensively, “your Ta’agra is quite good. If you’re the oldest soul shriven and you learned it before your life in Coldharbour, it actually is very feasible that this could be the form of it you would have known.”

“Exactly,” said Cadwell, turning back to the grave. “Now, where was I? Digging, I think. For some reason, this Betrayer chap’s head is damnably hard to find.” He patted the handle of his shovel for good measure before lifting it up again.

Raksha shook his head. “You are wasting your time. There are no remains here, nor would there be any reason to expect any.”

He looked back over his shoulder at him. “Are you sure about that? Not even a trace?”

“This one would sense the bones if there were any,” he said, firmly. “And there does not appear to be a coffin or container of any kind, so the skull would have fully dissolved into the soil after a few decades.”

Cadwell’s gaze went back to the grave. “I could have sworn there was, though. Not just a skull. The whole head.”

“Did you see it in your dream?” asked Raksha.

“Well, no,” he said. “I only saw the gravestone. But I _knew_ it was here.” His eyebrows pinched together. “Can’t explain it any better than that, I’m afraid. I could just feel it.”

Raksha’s fingers curled before his mouth as he looked down at the gravestone again.

Cadwell sighed, and shook his head. “But this is your area of expertise, isn’t it? You would know better than a dream.” He stabbed his shovel into the ground and stepped out of the hole with a few lanky steps, leaving the handle standing upright in the grave like the pole of a road sign. “I suppose Honor and I are just visiting Tamriel on a lark, then.”

“Tharn had a feeling the power surges might have been you,” said Raksha. “He asked this one to request your aid against the dragons if it was.”

His face immediately brightened. “Dragons! I haven’t fought a dragon since—” He paused for a moment, looking up and to the side. “You know, I can’t recall. I’m certain I’ve fought one or two in my day, but where? And when?” He shut his eyes and shook his head, laughing at himself. “Who knows? I suppose I’m lucky to remember anything at my age.”

“It’s a miracle you remember your own name after Coldharbour,” replied Raksha. “Most soul shriven turn feral after significantly less time without a soul.”

“Wasn’t I the one who told you that?” asked Cadwell.

He was, in fact, the one who had told Raksha that. It was three years earlier, and he mentioned it immediately after explaining that he had arrived in Coldharbour because his head had been “quite unceremoniously separated” from his body.

Raksha considered Cadwell’s face for a moment. His attention scanned across his features carefully, from the kind smile to the gentle squint of amusement in his eyes. Everything about him was open, and almost painfully sincere. He seemed less capable of deception than _Honor_ did.

“You have told Raksha a lot of things,” he finally settled on. “That was likely one of them, though he could have guessed it from existing theory of the animus.”

“There’s guessing and then there’s knowing from experience,” replied Cadwell. “Though that’s not how mages think, is it? How did you put it again? You need to support the hypotenuse with Imperial evidence?”

“Hypothesis and empirical evidence,” said Raksha, shaking his head. “But aside from that, yes. Though that’s still anecdotal, not empirical.”

“I suppose I should leave that up to Abnur, then,” he said, cheerfully. “Speaking of which, how is the old boy?”

The Khajiit gave a light shrug of his shoulders. “Abnur Tharn is Abnur Tharn. This one was surprised to hear from him after Coldharbour, but it seems he is concerned enough about this matter with the dragons that he is willing to humble himself, to a degree.”

He made a sound that was somewhere between a surprised puff and a laugh. “Abnur humbling himself? That’s a hard one to imagine.”

“He is not prostrating himself upon the ground,” said Raksha. “Nor has he swallowed his pride enough to request aid from Lyris Titanborn or Sai Sahan. But he was willing enough to send this one a summons, despite the trouble it must have taken to hire a courier that could find him. Her fee surely could not have been cheap.”

“That’s not that surprising,” replied Cadwell. “You’re the only one who didn’t want to wring his neck after he made off with the Amulet of Kings.”

Another shrug. “He’s the highest ranking Imperial of the old court left alive. Of course he wouldn’t leave it with anyone else.” A bit of a wry smile and a glance to the side. “Though Raksha does not recall you desiring to ‘ring his neck’ either.”

“To be fair, it’s probably my fault he had the chance to,” said Cadwell, sheepishly. “Happened to be a little distracted at the time, you know, asking Meridia to help you out while you tanned the hide off Molag Bal.”

“Speaking of Meridia,” said Raksha. “How is she doing after everything?”

“Oh, I assume well enough,” he replied. “It’s been a few years, after all.”

“No,” he said, with a twitch of an ear. “Not after everything in Coldharbour. After everything from a few months ago.”

Cadwell blinked at him, eyes wide and utterly without a clue. Raksha stared back at him in complete bewilderment.

“Dawnbreaker was corrupted,” he said, his ears angling to each side. “Most of her followers in Summerset were killed by the Court of Bedlam. None of this is ringing any bells?”

“Ah,” said Cadwell. His eyes remained wide, but there was now a wrinkle of worry to his brow, as well. “Maybe I should have checked in on her a bit sooner.”

“This one was in Wrothgar and he could not avoid hearing about it,” said Raksha. “How long has it been since you ‘checked in’?”

He looked off to the side. “I’m not quite sure, exactly.” One of his hands wandered over to pick at the iron salver on his other elbow. “One year? Maybe two.”

“ _Moons_ , Cadwell,” he swore. “You haven’t spoken to Meridia in _two years?_ ”

“It’s easy to lose track of time in Oblivion,” replied Cadwell, gripping his arm just above the salver. “Besides, on a mythic level where everyone lives for eras and no one stays dead forever, two years isn’t a lot of time, really.”

Raksha sighed, and turned towards the setting sun. “It grows late. There will be plenty of time to talk about this in Riverhold, but we should make haste.” His eyes darted back to Cadwell and he gave the tiniest flash of a fang. “Besides, this one still owes you that drink he promised you back in Vvardenfell.”

“There’s no owing anything, friend,” said Cadwell, eyes rising to meet his gaze again. “I was happy to help. Not that I’ll refuse a bit of friendly hospitality, of course.”

Raksha did not get the chance to buy Cadwell a drink in Riverhold—Mulaamnir and the Euraxian invasion force got in the way of that. It would have to wait until a few days later in Rimmen, the night before Raksha and Abnur Tharn went to parley with Queen Euraxia.

☙

It would have been a small blessing if he remembered nothing between his death and his resurrection. Not that it would have been fantastic, going directly from Anequina chopping his head off to an orc in robes holding him up to the moons. He would have been disoriented no matter what, but at least he would only had to cope with about seven or eight decades of inescapable misery.

But no—Cadwell had to have about thirty-five centuries of it instead.

He’d never spent much time with orcs before Zumog Phoom, truth be told. The Saliache kept mostly men as slaves, supplemented with cats and lizards; other mer, even profoundly foreign ones, were entirely off-limits. True to form, Phoom didn’t show an ounce of pity, which suited Cadwell just fine. He was a project, a proof of concept, a living demonstration of the necromancer’s skill and might. As long as he was coherent and coordinated, it made no difference what he thought or felt about anything.

Still. Strange choice, reuniting the head with its original soul from beyond. Not that Cadwell was that well-versed in the magical arts, but he was fairly sure you couldn’t bind a mortal soul like you could bind a Daedra. It’d be like that one mage in the Massacre who tried to cut corners by conjuring a fire atronach with half the usual incantation. Did it work? Yes. And she was the first one it turned on.

He just needed to bide his time, then.

There was a great deal to catch up on, and it took a great deal of effort to do it as a floating head. There was no point to complaining—the “floating” part wasn’t technically included in his resurrection, and it was for Phoom’s convenience only that he wasn’t forced to roll across the ground, grinding dust and sand into his beard. It only took one demonstration before he learned to hold his tongue.

The servants of the Rimmen Palace looked at him with pity whenever they saw him, but he had to hold his tongue with them, as well. He could ask Phoom for books, and he might be given a pile, but the servants were the ones with the hands to fetch a book and lay it open on a table. The servants were the ones he had to ask to turn the page when trying to shove it over with his nose failed and using his teeth risked tearing it clean off.

He hated that he had to ask.

Phoom seemed to have a wicked sense of humor hidden in his tusks, because among the books he’d loaned to Cadwell to read was the Adabal-a: memoirs of Morihaus, the consort of Alessia. That wasn’t even her name, it turned out, but that came as no surprise—she, too, was a product of the breeding pens of Sard. The both of them were raised like livestock, no family and no birth name other than whatever was convenient at the time. “Alessia” came out of a title, “Al-Esh”. “Cadwell” came out of another slave’s joke that turned into a pet name of sorts: he was a cad, no doubt, but damned if he didn’t _cad well_.

It was probably not coincidence that the High Highness succeeded where the cad didn’t stand a chance. Having a demigod man-bull and a star-made knight on her side didn’t hurt matters, either.

Then again, if he’d ever had such allies himself, he probably would have ended up having to kill them, too. Khunzar-ri wasn't the first of his kind—he was just the most painful.

The warm light of sunset began to fade from the windows, and a Dagi-raht maid came by with a lit candle on a saucer, setting it down beside the book. Before he could catch himself, he had mumbled a short word of thanks in Ta'agra at her. She looked about as shocked as he felt.

“What are you staring at?” The snarl was almost more at himself than at her. “Don’t make more out of it than it is.”

She apologized and excused herself. He put more effort into trying to turn the page with the tip of his nose.

He could smell incense, suddenly, even though there was none in the room.

A bard was playing a slow and gentle tune on the zither. Cadwell was holding a glass of spiced whiskey in one hand. His other arm lazily draped along the sofa's backboard, resting behind the robed black Cathay next to him. They were sitting close enough for hips to touch, and then his companion laughed, leaning into his side in a moment of lightning that he immediately covered up with a drink of whiskey.

The moment was gone quickly, the smell of incense fading after the sights and sounds of the inn. The taste of whiskey still lingered in his mouth for some time.

His other self was having a night out, it seemed.

The premise behind the creation of soul shriven was simple. A Daedric Prince can divert a mortal soul to a plane of Oblivion under the right circumstances, and immortality can then be granted by union with a vestige and formation of a morphotype from chaotic creatia. It was Molag Bal who took these principles and thought: why not take the soul back out, put it in a gem, and just let the vestige remain? The vestige would reform infinitely all by itself, after all—an immortal slave to torture forever, while the trapped soul lends its power to the machinery at hand.

There had been a time when Cadwell was almost proud of his vestige. Like the real thing, he refused to surrender. Infinite reformation after death? Infinite opportunities to escape. If there was a hairline crack, he was going to find it and split it open until it gaped as wide as the Scar.

This lost its appeal when he realized it didn’t apply to him. His vestige couldn't be kept down, but he could do nothing from the inside of a soul gem. He’d play at knighthood and stage a thousand rescues of hollowing unfortunates, but Cadwell had never once attempted to save his own soul.

Thirty-five centuries of this.

He tried to turn his attention back to Morihaus’ writings, but to be quite frank he did not want to read about the hunting of children in “nighttime tiger sport”, or slaves drugged within an inch of their lives for some Ayleid’s idle amusement. He bristled at being lectured to across the ages about _flesh sculpture_ by some demigod son of Kynareth—did Morihaus even _know_ anyone who had been made into a flesh sculpture? The Suthay who taught Cadwell to speak Ta’agra was. The pattern of his fur added an intriguing texture to the piece, the elves said, chatting pleasantly over the sound of his screams as they roasted the rest of him alive.

Alessia prayed to the Divines for deliverance and was sent visions and heroes to fight at her side. Cadwell prayed to the Divines, whole centuries before her, and received nothing but silence.

Hang the Divines, every last one of them.

He needed to calm down. This was going nowhere. Morihaus and Alessia and the whole lot were long since dead, and the Divines, obviously, didn't give a skeever’s arse one way or another.

“Are you all right?” he heard a Khajiit’s voice say, and he could smell the incense again.

“I think so,” he found himself saying, turning to face the black Cathay. “Not quite sure what that was about, to be honest. Maybe I’ve had a bit too much too fast.”

“Perhaps,” said the Khajiit. “Are you usually a sad drunk, Cadwell?”

“Can’t say I’ve really thought about it,” he replied. “I mean, it’s not like when Honor’s had a tipple—don't let that gentle face fool you, by the way, now _there’s_ a terrifying drunk if I’ve ever seen one. Fight you, fight the bar, fight the whole building—”

A bantam guar screeched with indignance from a nearby tea table as the Khajiit broke down laughing.

“It’s not an insult if it’s true,” said Cadwell. “That's why you’re not allowed any, you know.”

“A steed with a Nord’s heart,” said the Khajiit between giggles. The way his whiskers moved when he smiled reminded him of Khunzar-ri. His golden eyes settled on his face, and the smile faded into a familiar expression of gentle concern.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you. You were on a roll just now, telling me all about—what was his name again? Device Fire?”

“ _Divayth Fyr,_ ” said the Khajiit, laughing into his cup. “Moons, Cadwell, how can you be so terrible at names?”

He wasn’t, in fact. It took a very good memory for names and phrases to consistently get them that wrong. But it made him laugh, didn’t it?

The Khajiit—Raksha—picked up where he had left off, a tale of a time he accompanied a Telvanni wizard in a descent through the caves below Mournhold into the Dwarven ruins of Bamz-Amschend.

“Wait, did I hear that right?” Cadwell let his free hand fall forward along the sofa, dangling next to Raksha’s shoulder. “Mournhold’s built on top of a Dwarven hold?”

“Almalexia is not proud of that fact, it would seem,” said Raksha, taking a sip of his rum. “That makes it a better hiding place than any other, in a way. If it’s a secret for an obvious reason, no one would be inclined to assume another.”

His tail curled up, brushing against Cadwell's fingers. Another bolt shot through him, calling for another dive into his whiskey, but the Khajiit did not seem to notice and continued his story.

As Raksha spoke of the two mages entering Seht’s Vault, Cadwell let his arm fall from the backboard to rest on the Khajiit's shoulders. His only reaction was to lean into the soft part of Cadwell's arm as he regaled how the factotums recognized Fyr at first sight, and knelt before him in welcome.

Cadwell's hand came to rest on the Khajiit's upper arm as the story moved on to Divayth Fyr’s shadow, and he could swear Raksha was purring.

He could still feel the vibration in phantom hands as the scene faded away once more.

Well. He could see where this was going.

Cadwell wondered, briefly, if his vestige was stupid enough to think he was the seducer in this context. Briefly, because the answer was almost certainly “yes”.

He considered diving back into the Adabal-a purely out of spite—a conscious choice to wreck himself with memories of the worst of the worst, just to ruin the mood.

Instead, he floated over to the window and stared out over the rooftops of Rimmen.

Raksha didn't look a thing like Khunzar-ri, technically. They were both different furstocks, for a start: one was a lithe Cathay under half the height of a barrel-chested Pahmar-raht. Slipping an arm around Khunzar-ri would have been physically impossible.

The fine details, though—the movement of their whiskers, the shape of their smiles, the look in their shining golden eyes.

He couldn’t say that he’d spent those centuries in Coldharbour without a moment of doubt or regret. If only he could solidly believe he’d done the right thing, far better than letting Khunzar-ri use him and throw him away. He knew if he had, he probably would have been mad enough to be manipulated into using the Mace. And then Molag Bal would have won.

Even in the times he hated Khunzar-ri, his hatred for Molag Bal was greater. That was what he had to lean on.

As the moons rose and the lights in the windows went out one by one, Cadwell found himself wishing he had just curled up in Khunzar-ri's arms after he drank himself to sleep.

☙

Abnur Tharn clearly had a deep and abiding appreciation for the sound of his own voice. Whether he was expounding on the financial double-bind of Rimmen workhouses or analyzing his half-sister’s gamble in turning the palace trebuchets towards the city itself, Tharn had words for every topic, and on some level he derived a pure, almost childlike pleasure from making those words emerge from his mouth with precise artistic control. In another time, another place, he might have had the vocation of a bard. An extremely Tharn bard.

“Let me do the talking,” he told Raksha, as they climbed the stone steps leading up to the palace entrance. “As the elder Tharn, I’ll demonstrate my dominance over Euraxia and negotiate a cessation of hostilities.”

“This one hopes that it should be so simple,” the Khajiit said, following a few steps behind and leaning on his staff. “Two senche growling at each other until the smaller one withdraws.”

“Not quite how I would put it, but it’s an apt metaphor,” replied Tharn. “Failing that, of course, we have you to fall back on. Euraxia never could resist a pretty face.”

The joke was that Raksha was wearing a Telvanni helm—a fluted, bulbous design surrounding his entire head, with a full face visor for extra protection.

“Anything to buy time for Riverhold,” he replied, dryly. “Even with Cadwell’s portals, it will take the Defense Force some time to regroup.”

“Speaking of Cadwell,” said Tharn, glancing back at the Khajiit over his shoulder. “Has your headache cleared up any?”

He said nothing, simply nodding in reply.

“Good.” The battlemage turned to face forward again as they reached the top of the steps and entered the palace yard. “I confess I find it more than a little surprising that you indulged that much. It seems a bit uncharacteristic for you, if I must say so myself.”

Raksha spoke fluent enough Tharn to understand: this was an expression of concern.

“This one does not intend to make it a habit,” he said. “He made the mistake many a Khajiit has made before him—thinking that if a small amount of rum helps with nerves, a large amount must help even more. It is not a mistake this one cares to repeat.”

“That much I could have guessed,” said Tharn. “But it’s also uncharacteristic for you to have _nerves_. I sincerely doubt you feel any real fear about these proceedings, when you could face the horrors of Coldharbour and barely blink an eye.”

In the silence that followed—broken only by the sound of their boots on the cobblestone—Tharn had, of course, embedded a question. Purely implied, as such delicate subject matter required.

Raksha could not help but roll back the hours in his mind. Every second on that sofa in the inn was filled with a thousand assessments and calculations, reassessments, recalculations—was this welcome? Was it unwelcome? Was Cadwell moving closer, too, or was he simply being friendly? Was that a flinch just now? If it was, was it a response to something Raksha did, or the bard hitting a sour note? Even the tactics of war seemed simple by comparison.

He thought he had paced himself quite well, to be honest. He had spaced his drinks out with food, and made sure to drink as much water as he drank rum. It wasn’t a certainty that soul shriven could have hangovers, but Raksha’s pride as a healer would be unsatisfied with anything less.

He remembered stumbling together along the covered walkway connecting the main part of the inn to his room, the cool night air blowing through the latticework. Cadwell was helping to hold him up with one arm, though he was hardly doing any better himself. He remembered laughing at something he said—something ridiculous, it always was with Cadwell—and falling back against the painted door, pulling him down into the doorwell with him. Raksha was holding him by the collar, close enough that he could hear nothing but the sound of Cadwell’s breath and the beating of his own heart.

This was his chance.

His whiskers brushed against Cadwell’s ear as he leaned in to whisper an invitation. He could not remember his exact words—it was the tone, after all, that should say everything. Words could vary, as they should; tone, he couldn’t fake. Not for this.

He drew back, his head against the door again, and watched Cadwell’s face, waiting for him to respond.

Cadwell was looking off to the side, seemingly at nothing. His expression was hard to read—pensive? Tired? Sad? None of the above? He could not tell. The only thing Raksha could be sure of was that it wasn’t disgust, and that was the only relief he could draw from it.

It seemed like eras passed before Cadwell shut his eyes and moved to lean in closer.

Raksha’s heartbeat was like a war drum, he realized. A stereotype every bard has used? Yes, but also true. He shut his own eyes, and held his breath.

He felt Cadwell’s forehead press against his own, a thumb gently stroking the fur on his cheekbones.

“No,” he said, softly. “You’re drunk.”

And then he drew back, the cold night air rushing into the space between them.

At arm’s length, he helped Raksha open the door to his room. He stood at the threshold, watching to make sure that he safely made it inside, but he did not enter. He did not even put one foot inside the door frame.

Cadwell was the one to shut the door and walk away.

Raksha collapsed onto the bed fully dressed. He could not say when he fell asleep, if he did at all. In the morning, there was no time to find Cadwell to talk about any of it, if he was even still in Rimmen at that point. Chances were good he’d already taken a portal back to Riverhold, and that was assuming he’d stuck around instead of going back to Coldharbour.

Raksha genuinely couldn’t say if what he woke up with was a hangover, in the truest sense. A headache can come from gritting your teeth, red eyes from crying. But a hangover is easily explained, and easily understood.

Of course, Tharn had the sense to know when he was being given an easy answer.

“This one does not fear Euraxia, this is true,” Raksha said, adjusting his gloves and shifting the grip on his staff. “What could she do to this one, anyway? Death? A minor nuisance. Torture? A passing discomfort. Her only option is to focus on the others around this one, instead.”

“That’s what I would wager, if I had to,” said Abnur Tharn. “So many think that to inspire fear, you need to be threatening. That’s a very surface level reading of it, however. Fear is almost always about change. Even if the change is positive, it can be absolutely terrifying, because it’s unknown territory.”

Raksha turned, looking at Tharn’s profile as they approached the palace entrance.

“Have you spoken to Cadwell this morning?” he asked.

“Every conversation I have with Cadwell makes my head throb,” replied Tharn, as the guards opened the doors to let them inside.

The vestibule of the Rimmen Palace contained a statue of a great Ohmes-raht, though Raksha could not recall which figure of history it memorialized. The statue was flanked on each side by a pair of staircases, leading up to a landing before the doors to the throne room. The doors were closed, and before them stood a stern-looking orc in robes. A man’s head floated beside him, visibly glowing with magicka. He had been turned to the side, speaking with the orc, but turned to face them as the palace doors were shut with the rumble of ancient wood.

The head looked like Cadwell, Raksha noted, as Tharn excused himself and stepped aside to speak with the palace guard. He was not entirely surprised, but on some level, it was still striking to see, especially without a pot covering most of his hair. As the Khajiit approached the bottom of one stair, he floated out over the landing’s edge, past the head of the Ohmes-raht statue, descending weightlessly to Raksha’s eye level.

He had bright blue eyes, piercing and keen. The familiar milky white cataracts were entirely absent, as were the gentle crow’s-feet at their corners. They did not seem to contain even a shred of mercy, and yet Raksha could not help but feel a twinge of regret. If Cadwell had eyes like these when they had first met, he might have been less able to attribute the warmth in his face to the campfire, and Vvardenfell might have gone very differently.

“I know you,” said the Betrayer. “I saw you through the soul shriven’s eyes—the fool who thinks he’s the shining knight of Cyrod.”

“So there _is_ a connection,” replied Raksha, drawing himself together. “This one had suspected as much when Cadwell spoke of having visions of the grave of the head.”

“ _I’m_ Cadwell,” he spat. “The hero of Cyrod, the villain of Elsweyr, the Champion of the Third Nedic Massacre. The genuine article, not some botched half-mad abomination from the flesh-cauldrons of Oblivion.”

The Khajiit clasped his hands and gave a small bow of apology. “Raksha apologizes for any rudeness he may have accidentally conveyed in his phrasing. There is no competition here. You possess the Soul and Body, and are Cadwell. He possesses the Vestige and Morphotype, and is also Cadwell—”

“I already have to spend most of my day with one insufferable necromancer,” snapped Cadwell. “If I have no choice but to listen to some fool prattle on about animus and chaotic creatia, I’ll stick to the one that doesn’t try to sleep with everything that moves, thanks.”

His tail froze. He could feel each hair on it rising in a shiver of disbelief.

“This one has surely misheard you,” said Raksha, trying to keep his tone civil.

“I told you, I’ve seen you through the fool’s eyes,” Cadwell said. “And while he may be too much of an idiot to call a spade a spade, I know ‘any port in a storm’ when I see it.”

His tail was at full strength now, twitching with barely restrained anger. Before he could say anything in reply, the robed orc was already halfway down the stairs.

“So you're Abnur Tharn's bodyguard and valet?” he called out to him, when he was close enough to do so without shouting. One hand rested on the railing as he descended. “Not what I expected.”

“Raksha Cord-Eater, at your service,” said the Khajiit, reining in his irritation as best he could. A solid professional, in the presence of another professional.

“I am Queen Euraxia's chief necromancer,” replied the orc. “You may call me Zumog Phoom. The other gravecallers answer to me.”

Raksha gave a small nod of polite recognition. “A fellow necromancer, then. There are not very many in these times, it seems.”

“People are afraid of what they do not understand,” said Phoom. “At least Queen Euraxia allows us to practice without fear of persecution. A pity you’ve chosen to side with the fools who oppose her.”

He shrugged. “Tharn sought this one out for his talents, nothing more and nothing less. If Euraxia and her half-brother can come to an agreement, there is no conflict and no opposition.”

“So you’re saying you’re on Tharn’s side above all others.” Zumog Phoom could not help but grin at this, it seemed. “You do have some sense, after all.”

“As do you, it would appear,” said Raksha. “This one is not without his criticisms of the gravecallers under your command, however. You appear to be making the same mistake as the Black Worm—a foolish emphasis on quantity over quality.”

The orc chuckled. “You think that, do you? I suppose you would have eager students of destruction casting fire storms right out of the gate, then.”

“Is that what the cadaver forges are, then? Basic training for the ja’khajiit?”

“They need the practice,” said Phoom. “What better way to make raising second nature than to be require them to do it repeatedly? Begin with the unmarked mass graves of the Knahaten Flu, then hone that skill on the battlefield, under the pressure of limited time. Once they’ve mastered the basics, then it’s time to move on to greater challenges.” He crossed his arms and nodded at the Khajiit. “Improvement comes from always pushing yourself just outside what’s comfortable, not from tackling the impossible with nothing but high expectations.”

Entirely without realizing it, Raksha’s hand had come to rest where his chin would be, were he not wearing his helmet.

“Your pedagogy is better thought out than Mannimarco’s was,” he said, thoughtfully. “It seems as though he had no patience for those without innate talent, and left them to flounder without guidance.”

Phoom snorted. “Left them to teach themselves, you mean. The way he acted, you’d think he was never a beginner at anything, ever.”

“In a way, he wasn’t,” said Raksha. “This one could sympathize, but of course, Mannimarco did not want his sympathy.” He turned back towards the floating head of Cadwell. “In any case, this one doubts a calling to teach the dark arts is the entirety of what brought you to Anequina.”

“Ah, yes,” said the orc, with a wry grin. “I see you have met my familiar and confidant, Sir Cadwell the Betrayer. Your instincts are correct. The reanimation of a legend is a project more suited to a necromancer of my caliber.”

“He is quite different from the Cadwell this one is familiar with.”

“The creature you know is a pale shadow of the dark knight that once walked these lands.”

“You may say that,” said Raksha, “but yours is a bit lacking below the neck.”

The Betrayer gritted his teeth as Zumog Phoom turned to regard him, eyes half-lidded, as if not entirely inclined to disagree with this assessment.

“My actions don’t concern you,” he said, in a tone of voice that made it clear this meant “he’s a work in progress”. “I just wanted to meet Abnur Tharn’s lackey and determine if Queen Euraxia had anything to fear. It would seem not.”

“The moons shine on your endeavors,” said Raksha—a phrase he was fond of because it sounded like a compliment, in spite of the fact that the moons shine on _everything_.

The throne room did not appear drastically changed from the state it must have had in the time of King Hemakar—the decorations and various accoutrements of the long hall remained distinctly Anequine, without a trace of Imperial aesthetic. Raksha followed a stride behind Tharn, playing the role of respectful bodyguard as authentically as possible.

On some level, he was sure that act was half of Tharn’s enjoyment of the situation. Raksha did not mind, to be honest. An old man must be allowed to have his fun in some capacity, no?

A finely dressed herald stepped forward. “Presenting Abnur Tharn, Grand Chancellor and Overlord of Nibenay, Imperial Battlemage of the Elder Council, and Patriarch of the Tharn dynasty.” She gestured with one hand to Raksha. “And his bodyguard.”

Euraxia Tharn’s choice of royal regalia was, in some ways, not surprising. She wore armored robes befitting an Imperial battlemage, with the red and gold coloring being the only nod to both her assumed stature and the style of the people she ruled. Her hair was bound back in an ornate but practical braided bun, and her diadem was also ultimately on the more practical side. The sum of it all made her seem out of place, disconnected, and proudly unaware of this as she stood before them and looked down her long, aquiline nose at the elder Tharn.

“Ah, half-brother,” she said. “Your arrival. It’s so unexceptional.”

He stepped forward, irritably. “Pretending to be a queen isn’t—”

She raised her palm dismissively and turned her head away, eyes lowered to the ground. Euraxia genuinely looked like she was seconds away from yawning.

Raksha was almost amazed at how red Tharn’s face turned as he bit back his words. It seemed he had underestimated his half-sister’s Tharn-ness.

After a pause to make her point, she turned back, but her attention was not on Abnur Tharn. Her eyes settled on Raksha, and her face went rigid, stone-like, as if she was attempting to become a living wall.

“I was led to believe Javad’s murderer would be taller,” said Euraxia.

Tharn glanced back over his shoulder at Raksha, with a bit more white showing in his eyes than usual. Ah. Had he forgotten to take that into account?

“This one was simply defending Reaper’s March from the forces of Molag Bal,” said Raksha. “Consider it an unfortunate tragedy that such work brought him into conflict with your son.”

“And you believe I would just take you at your word?” She huffed. It was almost identical to a huff that Tharn had given many times in Coldharbour, when he was still under Mannimarco’s thumb. “To think, I once dreamed of torturing you for a dozen years. Now I see you’re not worth the effort.” She raised her chin high again, mouth drawn thin in an expression that was also one Raksha had seen many times on Tharn’s face before. “So, why come to me about the dragons?”

“A dragon was involved in the attack on Riverhold,” he told her.

“Oh, a dragon attacks a gathering of unruly cats, and you blame that on me?” Euraxia chuckled. “Next you’ll say it’s my fault that autumn turns to winter.”

“That would be a fair criticism,” said Raksha, “if this one had not spoken with Mulaamnir. Perhaps you do not realize that he refers to you as his puppet.”

Euraxia’s sole response was to roll her eyes.

“You’re hardly inclined to listen to me,” said Tharn, “but you’re a fool if you think—”

“Do not lecture me, _half-brother_.” There was venom in her voice, and a hint of something else. Her gaze returned to Raksha. “You will not sway me, son-killer, but you are right about one thing—Mulaamnir and I have a special relationship. An understanding. The dragons will secure my hold over Elsweyr, and there is nothing you or Abnur can do to stop them.”

The Khajiit shook his head. “You’re doing exactly what Mulaamnir wants you to do.”

“Enough,” said Euraxia, turning to look past both Raksha and Tharn. Raksha turned to follow her gaze: Zumog Phoom was approaching the throne.

“The Desert Wind Adeptorium has fallen, Your Highness,” said Phoom. “We move against Riverhold on your word.”

A wicked grin slowly grew on her face, and her eyes shot back to Raksha.

“I changed my mind,” said the Usurper Queen. “I _will_ have you tortured. Repeatedly. Rumor has it that death means as little to you as it does to a Daedra, but a true professional can avoid that issue, I am sure.”

“Treachery?” Tharn chuckled to himself, dryly. “My word. How could I have _ever_ anticipated this?”

Euraxia raised her staff. “Guards! Take them to the dungeons!”

“I think not,” said Tharn, as the world was filled with blinding light.

☙

“Perhaps,” said Raksha, as a solid mass of frozen skeever floated past them, “it might have been wiser to bring Cadwell along as your ‘bodyguard’.”’

“I must confess,” said Tharn, pausing to take a breath, “that the idea did occur to me.”

The Khajiit pried his eyes away from the skeever iceberg and toward the rest of the sewer tunnel. “With his portals, you would be back in Riverhold already. And then, again, to the Desert Wind Adeptorium in minutes.”

“I am well aware,” replied the battlemage, with a small edge creeping into his voice.

“This one means no slander of your skill,” said Raksha as they waded through the muck. “It is only reasonable that Euraxia would have strengthened the palace wards beyond your ability to penetrate. Few outside of the Psijic Order would be able to manage even this much.”

Abnur Tharn huffed, leaning on his staff as he followed behind. “Now _that_ may be overstating things a tad. Your vote of confidence is appreciated, however.”

“Raksha’s point,” he said, “is that Cadwell has an unusual talent. Where an invasion force sent to Coldharbour by the Mages Guild was scattered across the entire realm due to its defenses, Cadwell never once teleported anywhere but the intended destination.” He paused, and for a few seconds, there was only the sound of water sloshing around as they continued to trudge forward. “This one has always wondered how that could be possible.”

“Perhaps he’s simply had a great deal of time to practice,” said Tharn.

The Khajiit looked at Abnur Tharn out of the corner of his eye, relieved that his helmet would hide this fact. An Imperial battlemage, strong enough to drive off a dragon alone, could be exhausted from the effort of teleporting a mere few stories below to the palace sewers. He might blame it on his age, but the fact was—this was not unusual. Teleporting quickly to a place one has never been, even with preparation in advance, was a difficult matter for anyone. Even a Tharn.

It was something that Cadwell did on a regular basis. Sometimes while distracted and only paying half-attention to his surroundings. There seemed no ward capable of misdirecting him an inch. He was one of a kind. Without parallel.

And Raksha’s foolishness might well have driven him off.

“Perhaps,” said Raksha, gripping his staff tightly. “Perhaps.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have quite possibly re-written the "no, you're drunk" scene more than any other scene in this story, mostly to switch POV. It is very, very different from Cadwell's perspective. (Both of them.)


End file.
